SQLBrowseConnect

Article
01/10/2024

Applies to: SQL Server Azure SQL Database Azure SQL Managed Instance Azure Synapse Analytics Analytics Platform System (PDW)

SQLBrowseConnect uses keywords that can be categorized into three levels of connection information. For each keyword, the following table indicates whether a list of valid values is returned and whether the keyword is optional.

Level 1

Keyword	List returned?	Optional?	Description
DSN	N/A	No	Name of the data source returned by SQLDataSources. The DSN keyword cannot be used if the DRIVER keyword is used.
DRIVER	N/A	No	SQL Server Native Client ODBC driver name is {SQL Server Native Client 11}. The DRIVER keyword cannot be used if the DSN keyword is used.

Level 2

Keyword	List returned?	Optional?	Description
SERVER	Yes	No	Name of the server on the network on which the data source resides. The term "(local)" can be entered as the server, in which case a local copy of SQL Server can be used, even when this is a non-networked version.
UID	No	Yes	User login ID.
PWD	No	Yes (depends on the user)	User-specified password.
APP	No	Yes	Name of the application calling SQLBrowseConnect.
WSID	No	Yes	Workstation ID. Typically, this is the network name of the computer on which the application runs.

Level 3

Keyword	List returned?	Optional?	Description
DATABASE	Yes	Yes	Name of the SQL Server database.
LANGUAGE	Yes	Yes	National language used by SQL Server.

SQLBrowseConnect ignores the values of the DATABASE and LANGUAGE keywords stored in the ODBC data source definitions. If the database or language specified in the connection string passed to SQLBrowseConnect is invalid, SQLBrowseConnect returns SQL_NEED_DATA and the level 3 connection attributes.

The following attributes, which are set by calling SQLSetConnectAttr, determine the result set returned by SQLBrowseConnect.

Attribute	Description
SQL_COPT_SS_BROWSE_CONNECT	If it is set to SQL_MORE_INFO_YES, SQLBrowseConnect returns an extended string of server properties. The following is an example of an extended string returned by SQLBrowseConnect: `ServerName\InstanceName;Clustered:No;Version:8.00.131` In this string, semi-colons separate various pieces of information about the server. Use commas to separate different server instances.
SQL_COPT_SS_BROWSE_SERVER	If a server name is specified, SQLBrowseConnect will return information for the server specified. If SQL_COPT_SS_BROWSE_SERVER is set to NULL, SQLBrowseConnect returns information for all servers in the domain. Note that due to network issues, SQLBrowseConnect might not receive a timely response from all servers. Therefore, the list of servers returned can vary for each request.
SQL_COPT_SS_BROWSE_CACHE_DATA	When the SQL_COPT_SS_BROWSE_CACHE_DATA attribute is set to SQL_CACHE_DATA_YES, you can fetch data in chunks when the buffer length is not large enough to hold the result. This length is specified in the BufferLength argument to SQLBrowseConnect. SQL_NEED_DATA is returned when more data is available. SQL_SUCCESS is returned when there is no more data to retrieve. The default is SQL_CACHE_DATA_NO.