Siebel Data Sources – An Overview

Database is an indispensable part of any software including Siebel. Then also rarely do we know or try to know that how our software is interacting or connecting with database.
In this series of articles I will try to divulge the details of what happens in the background and how this information can be helpful in troubleshooting database connectivity problems.

Siebel like many other software uses Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) to connect to the database. ODBC is a industry standard that was developed in 1992. It gives you the interface to connect to database and hides all the details and coding required for connecting and interacting with database.

In Windows 9x you can go to control panel and click on the ODBC Data Source icon to see the details of data sources that exists on your system.

In Windows XP and Windows 2000 you can use a enter odbcad32 in run box
or you can go Control Panel ==> Administrative tools ==> ODBC Data Sources

There are two types of data sources (DSN) available

User DSN: Available to only particular user account under which they are created
System DSN: They are pretty much same as User DSN except the following differences

• ONLY the System Administrator can; Add, Remove and Configure System DSN's.
• System DSN's will be used only if the DSN does not exist as a User DSN.In other words; your User DSN has precedence over the System DSN.
• Everyone shares the same list of System DSN's.

These DSN use different drivers to connect to different databases. Drivers contain the special code required to talk to the specific type of database you will work with. The Drivers often come from the vendor of the database. Your System Administrator is the only user who can install and register a Driver. You will select a Driver to use when adding a new DSN.

Siebel comes with a driver named Siebel Database. If you are to create a data source to connect to local database you will be using Siebel Database Driver.

In next few posts we will discuss, How to create and configure Siebel Data sources and How to change cfg file to use our new data sources etc.