Linked Server to Sybase 5.5

  • We have a 2 linked servers setup to 2 Sybase 5.5 database that I have just spent about two months writing scripts that use this linked server for an overnight process that feeds one of these DBs.

    All of a sudden the linked server would not allow me to connect giving me the error "Unable to connect to database server: database engine not running." I have no problem connecting to the dbs through Sybase's "SQL Central" (GUI) or "ISQL" which tells me that the DBs are still running. Talking to my DBA, he told me that Microsoft does not support Linked servers to Sybase dbs (I have included the link below) and he also told me that this problem has happened before and it just corrected itself by the next day. This isn't enough for me. The company will rely on these feeds when they go live and I can't have them intermittently break.

    http://search.microsoft.com/gomsuri.asp?n=1&c=rp_Results&siteid=us&target=http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q137/6/37.asp

    Does anyone have any ideas? I don't want to start rebuilding my feeds using DTS, since that will blow my deadline. Help!

  • I forgot to add that the SQL Server driver on one server is 3.50 and 3.60 on the other. I realize that these are super old and I believe the dba will be upgrading these within a week.

  • No they do not supprt SYbase thru the SQL Server drivers, they do support Sybase as a linked server via ODBC. Is the problem still occurring, have you tried to stop SQL and restart to see if corrects, reboot server and check, check with Sybase for any details on possible memory leaks. Need to find out what the message is referring to exactly. Could be the other side failed (soudns liek it wasn't open for connections) and thus you could not hit it.

  • What I don't understand is that it was working for a while. Enough time for me to build all these procedures to feed it and then right before it goes live it dies.

    Rebooting is sort of frowned upon with the network dept, do you know if there is any way of killing the instance of the running driver? As if it were a DLL?

  • Ok, it is fixed. Our DBA killed the instance of the Sybase Engine running on the machine and it started back up when he tried to connect again allowing access to the linked server.

    Not the slickest fix but it works for now until we can implement a better solution. Thanks for the help!

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