Re: Source name not found

Thanks for all the details. A previous reply to my post led me to the driver
and where to do the Windows configuring, and I was just about to continue
the database setup, but now it seems even more complicated. I have a single,
home PC, and I wanted the database to run from this one computer. Possibly,
in the future, a second home computer would write to the database. I don't
know where to find the DNS/IP of the "server" or whether there is one, I'm
not at all familiar with configuring PostgreSQL, and I'm generally uncertain
about much of what I've quoted below. I've lost interest (and lots of time)
in this.

I thought I'd be able to find a simple alternative to saving data in regular
files. I could have easily created a storage solution that meets my needs
with Perl, even without getting fancy with a function like seek, and another
option was Perl's DBM::Deep module, but I figured a regular database would
make accessing the data faster and easier once I learned SQL or one of its
flavors. It's debatable whether I should have bothered even if it were as
simple as I thought. As it turns out, there was no installer, the
instructions didn't work, the fixes I found elsewhere only got me to the
command prompt interface, and it now sounds like that wouldn't have worked
even if I didn't need access from Perl.

All this it too much. There's too big a learning curve from my old methods
of flat file storage to this, and the only help I've found at this stage is
through helpful people like you who are willing to take the time to explain
some of the things involved, rather than through the instructions that I've
been following or links from them to information I need to complete the
installation.

Thanks for your help everyone, but no more databases for me.

Barry

>The rest of the information is where you describe the
> backend DBMS setup.
>
> Data Source: <DSN>                            (e.g., MyApp)
> Database:    <name of PostgreSQL database>    (e.g., MyAppDB)
> Server:      <DNS/IP of PostgreSQL server>    (e.g., myserver.com)
> Port:        <TCP port PostgreSQL listens to> (e.g., 5432)

> 1.  Note above that Port: is one of the options.  Though I can't say for
>      certain, this to me indicates that PostgreSQL ODBC requires that you
>      setup your PostgreSQL server to listen via TCP/IP (as opposed to
>      using the Unix sockets approach).  This means you had better be
>      familiar with configuring PostgreSQL, which typically involves
>      making changes to a few config files, now typically located in
>
>          /var/postgresql/data
>
>      The files you want to familiarize yourself with are pg_hba.conf,
>      where you set your security (what IP addresses/users can access
>      PostgreSQL, etc.), and postgresql.conf, where you'll need to
>      specify that PostgreSQL should use TCP/IP (tcpip_socket = true)
>      and specify the port to listen on (5432 is the default).