Forum Discussion

Urid1969's avatar
Urid1969
Helper I
9 years ago
Solved

Cannot connect to AS400 via IBM DB2 database

Hello friends Keep getting error while trying to connect to AS400 
Need Help
  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    9 years ago

    Hi Urid1969,

    Firstly, please check the IBM AS400 server status and port status as per the below steps.

      a. Verify that if the IBM server is up and running following the troubleshoot steps in this article.
      b. Check the port status by using “netstat” in your IBM server and verify the port is in state Listen.

    Secondly, choose each driver in the following screenshot when connecting to IBM database and check if it is successful. When you choose IBM, please ensure that you have IBM DB2 Data Server Driver installed on your computer (minimum requirement is the IBM Data Server Driver Package (DS Driver)). Select the driver that matches your Power BI Desktop installation (32-bit or 64-bit).


    Thirdly, check if you are able to connect to IBM AS400 database from other application such as Excel.

    Thanks,
    Lydia Zhang

Nonsensely's avatar
Nonsensely
Advocate I
6 years ago

I ended up creating ODBC connections and connecting via ODBC to all of my iSeries files.  Not sure what the benefit is for having it either way, is the direct connection faster?

Anonymous's avatar
Anonymous
Not applicable
6 years ago

Nonsensely 

The ODBC connection is standard connection to any external database/query engine. If the direct connection you meant refers to direct query, then, direct query is very useful for dashboarrds where the data volume is huge. It helps you to access data right from the tables itself without having it extracted and stored in the Power BI desktop. 

If you are talking about direct IBM DB2 database connection instead of going through ODBC, I suppose, making odbc connection is easier as I faced lot of issues in giving the right port number for direct ibm db2. I don't think it is faster or slower in either case.