Creating a database in Ultralite 17 using SQL Central

In this post I describe the steps to create a database with all the default settings using the SQL Central interface. If you are new to SQL Central (was previously called Sybase Central) you may want to read my older posts here.

Launch SQL Central from All Programs under SQL Anywhere 17.
Click Tools and choose under UltraLite to create a database as shown.

Create_00.png

 Creating a database is driven by the Wizard which appears as soon as you click Create Database... in the above window. The following sequence of windows shows how the database is created. Although you can make many changes to the database settings, all defaults are used in this post.

You start with the welcome window. Read the notes here.

Click Next,

Use the Browse... button to find the location for the database you are going to create and provide a name. Herein the name is Mar25_2017.

Click Next. Accept the default storage settings.

 Click Next.
Next choose the Collation and character set. Herein Ultralite defaults are accepted.

 Click Next.
Accept the default creation parameters. Have a look at what they are (these are Ultralite defaults).
You can change any or all of them.

 Click Next.
You may leave this as is. Synchronization is important for synchronizing the UltraLite with the main server. For the moment you may leave this empty.

 Click Next after placing a check mark for connecting to the new database. This makes the database available in the SQL Central Management interface.

 

 Click Next. Oh! you get the command line way of creating this database. What the wizard delivered is the execution of the command line with the parameters (Switches) shown here. This is neat. Next time around you may just use the command line.

 Click Close. The database is created and now appears in the SQL Central under Ultralite 17 (Compare this to the very first image in this post)

Here is the Properties page for this database. Presently it has objects such as Tables, Users etc.

Report Builder Report using data from SQL Anywhere 16

Report Builder 3.0 is the present version shipped at the same time as SQL Server 2012. It is a one-stop report authoring tool which can even be launched from Report Manager or from a Reporting services Integrated SharePoint Site. Of course you can download and launch it after installing on your desktop.

The most viewed Report Builder tutorials are here:
Report Builder is described in great detail here:

http://jayaramkrishnaswamy.sys-con.com/node/982742
Creating reports using Report Builder 2.0 is described here

http://jayaramkrishnaswamy.sys-con.com/node/1227111

 

You can master Report Builder 3.0, just follow the step-by-step instructions

Report Builder 3.0 is described exhaustively in my latest book

Out of the box it can connect to a variety of vendor products and the inclusion of ODBC and OLE DB makes it extremely convenient to connect to many other (not out of the box supported) products

Case in point is SQL Anywhere Server 16 for which you can set up an ODBC connection

This post shows you some of the steps that you can follow to turn out a report from SQL Anywhere 16. The following assumes that you have already started the SQL Anywhere Personal server. The procedure has still some unanswered questions, please read the last section

The following screen shows how you connect to an ODBC source for a connection embedded with the report

The next slide shows an ODBC System DSN 'demo' created using the SQL Anywhere 16. In reality this ODBC DSN gets registered when you install SQL Anywhere 16

 The next slide shows that connectivity is OK with 'dba' as username and 'sql' as password

The final connectivity screen after testing the authentication is shown in the next image

 The Credentials for this connection are shown in the next image

In order to create a dataset for your report use of Query Designer is not possible as it is not supported. You need to have this information on your hand to insert into the Report Builder's data set page.

The next image shows the InteractiveSQL tool in which a SQL Select statement is used to choose a all the fields from the Contacts table.

The dataset will be created using this embedded connection as shown.

For this, the query contacts.sql created in Sybase's InteractiveSQL is used and persisted to the desktop. This is imported into Report Builder's data set interface as shown using the import button

.

The next image shows the report designer interface taking in a few columns from the data set shown on the left.

This last image shows the report being displayed in Report Builder 3.0

Caution

While the above procedure is correct you may find problems while repeating this procedure and this will be mainly due to the odbc32 and odbc64 problems as I understand it

However, take a look at my bug report to Microsoft connect here

https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/799460/report-displays-correctly-in-ssdt-and-deploys-without-errors-the-same-report-is-not-displayed-in-report-manager-or-report-server