Verify Your SQL Connection / Get Connection String

I have been very fortunate to have some fantastic mentors.  One of them is a gentleman by the name of Ken Ammann, who taught me this trick when you need to verify your SQL connection or get your connection string.

1) From your desktop, right-click and create a new text document.

2) Change the file extension from .txt to .udl

becomes:

3) Click Yes to verify the change of extension type.

4) Open the UDL file and set properties.

5) Test the connection.

6) Click OK.

7) Change file extension back to .txt

8) Take a look at your connection string.

It is a nice easy way to verify your SQL connections when you need to verify that you still have a SQL connection.  The real reason that I wrote this post is that I was spending too much time trying to recall the UDL extension name.

Excel Import Over 255 Characters

Another Excel gotcha!!!  I have a SQL column called myText and it is a varchar(2500), but when I tried to import the appropriate cell, I kept getting null values returned.  If my cell was 255 characters or less, I would be fine.  The first hint was in the sample preview for cell formating.  Anytime I saw hash marks in the sample box, my text would not import.

Here is how I fixed it!  Added a Custom "text" Type, and all the hash marks disappeared!