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Core Infrastructure and Security Blog
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Test remote SQL connectivity EASILY!

StevenRachui's avatar
StevenRachui
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Jan 22, 2019

First published on MSDN on Dec 13, 2010

I learned about something very useful today and thought I’d share.

Have you ever been troubleshooting a problem with remote SQL Iproxy MP, remote DB, etc) and wanted to test to see if the local system account (or any account for that matter) could make a remote connection to SQL but you didn’t want to install the SQL tools just to make that test?  Seems there is a file type – UDL file – that you can simply create that will bring up a window to allow testing of remote connections to SQL.

Just go anywhere on your system and create an empty text file named anything but instead of txt make sure the extension is UDL.  Then, double-click on the file and up pops a SQL connectivity window to allow testing of remote SQL connections.

Very easy to use to test connectivity with a known user account or as local system (using PSExec).

Updated Apr 07, 2020
Version 3.0
  • Jesper_Rex's avatar
    Jesper_Rex
    Copper Contributor

    Just remember, to select which provider you want to test, else it might choose an old outdated driver, that doesn't support TLS v1.2, if that is, what you are testing.

    Here is the providers, I had available, and I needed to test the "SQL Server Native Client 11.0" After updating it, to the latest version (2011.110.7001.00)