Many of these databases require a username and password to login. Many of the ODBC wizards written by these database developers support remembering the username used to login to their database. However, they usually don't provide a way to save the password, most likely due to security concerns.
If the security issue is not of great concern to you, there is a way to store the password inside the DSN that will allow you to use it in EViews without the need for a password prompt every time (this is usually important for those of you trying to automate a database refresh process of some kind).
First, you need to know that DSNs saved in the registry do not allow you to save the password. So if your DSN is stored there (if it shows up under the User DSN or System DSN tab in the ODBC Data Sources wizard, it's being stored in the registry), you'll need to create a new one under the File DSN tab.
Once you create it, open the dsn file using Notepad. You should see something like this:
SQL Server DSN Sample:
Code: Select all
[ODBC]
DRIVER=SQL Server
UID=user
PWD=password
Network=DBMSSOCN
DATABASE=Database1
WSID=WORKSTATION
APP=Microsoft® Windows® Operating System
SERVER=Server1
And that's it. The next time you use this DSN (e.g. from EViews) the password prompt should not appear.
Since the password is stored in the clear in this file, you should NOT use this method if you don't want your users knowing what the password is. One suggestion is that if you only need read capability thru this ODBC connection, you should setup a new database user with read-only access and then use that in this DSN file. On some database servers, you can also control which tables can be read and what time of day this user account is active.
Steve