Thursday, October 21, 2010

Fishbowl (Firebird) ODBC Connection

My company decided to use the Fishbowl Point-of-sale system to handle bookstore activities. My project was to get transactions out of this system and imported into our SMS (Student Managment System) for which we use CampusVue.

Fishbowl's back-end is an open-source DBMS called Firebird. CampusVue is running on a SQL Server database.

As usual I decided to use SSIS to achieve this task.

The first challenge was to be able to connect to the bookstore database. Upon reviewing documentation of the Fishbowl product I was able to create an ODBC connection to it. You will need to obtain the credentials used if you are facing the same task. This particular credentials only allows reading of the data but that's all I need.

Here is the way the ODBC connection is set up for all who needs it.


4 comments:

  1. Thanks for posting this! Just stumbled upon this while trying to debug a Fishbowl connection I was having and this definitely got me pointed in the right direction.

    Trying to establish a socket connection from a web app using an ODBC connection to my Fishbowl database, but the connection keeps timing out and Wireshark is showing no packets captured on the Fishbowl server's IP address. Did you do anything else to get your two systems talking? I'm more familiar with Unix systems, so I'm wondering if I'm missing something obvious.

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  2. Jonathon, I'm sorry for such a late reply. In the meantime you probably figured out your solution. In my case I was running my SSIS package locally on the server. I was not able to get a connection remotely. I really did not want to spend any more time on this fairly small project so this was good enough for me.

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  3. Anita, I could really use some help and you seem knowledgeable, I had a plugin developed that connect fishbowl to woo commerce in wordpress and will pull products from fishbowl to Woo Commerce, everything is working perfect on the test server. How ever when I try to connect to the local Server where fishbowl is installed I get connection errors such as this one Unable to complete network request to host "64.6.48.62". Failed to establish a connection.Im so at a lost of how to fix

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  4. Taylor, I doubt I'll be able to help you. This project was 3 years ago and in the meantime I changed jobs so I don't even have access to Fishbowl anymore. :(

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