Update: I’ve found the release note – they’ve just made it more work to get at I guess.
Oracle DB plugin is no longer copied to IDE Plugins folder by default. The MS SQL Server DB plugin is only copied to the IDE Plugins folder on Windows. All DB plugins are now available in Extras/Database Plugin Resources folder.
This is bad news for me, as I use that heavily in our business apps. Does this mean there is no upgrade path for Xojo users for their apps that utilize the MSSQL Server Plugin?
The MS SQL plugin has always been buggy, so long term might be good, but then Xojo has to provide the newer alternative.
The plugin is still available in the Extras folder. We used to use the ODBC plugin on Mac along with the Actual database drives to access MSSQL server from Mac. That seemed to work well.
It looks like MS is releasing an ODBC driver for other platforms. Either way you would have to switch to the ODBC plugin. Shouldn’t be too difficult.
The plugin still exists, somewhat hidden on new installs but, if you make mission critical apps and rely on microsoft premier, I’m expecting fat laughs when using the old SQLNCLI 11 with operating systems more modern than win8(native client is technically not supported on win8.1 let alone win10/11). I’ve made the thread since we have more and more unattended install failures for the native client on current systems, requiring manual intervention, something that the new odbc driver seems not to have.
Yes, but the new driver is ODBC and Xojo already has an ODBC plugin. You should be able to use it right away.
To be clear the ODBC plugin for Xojo provides the database end of their transaction for any database that has an ODBC driver. Since Microsoft are now providing the drives for all platforms you should be able to just download, configure and use it.
The connection strings should change, but the rest should be fairly similar. Unless the cursor properties are different.
At least on the few machines i tested my database-bound apps on, i will get a clear error indicating that sqlncli is not present if i attempt to connect to a mssql database on a machine that has only the new driver installed. Maybe there is some hardcoded reference to sqlncli.dll ?
Edit: just tested it now for you. On my laptop, which has the new odbc driver v18 and not native client, i get an explicit “SQL Native Client not installed” error when i execute a db connection. It’s hardcoded.
I’ve been using the Xojo ODBC plugin to connect to MS SQL Server. In the last several years it seems to work better than the SQL Server plugin. These apps run on Windows only, haven’t tried it on Mac or Linux.
As I said we used it on Mac, but back in the day we had to buy the “Actual SQLServer driver” as MS didn’t at that time provide one. We had no problems with that. ps. Actual is the name of a company.
