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up vote 3 down vote favorite

What would be a very fast way to determine if your connectionstring lets you connect to a database?

Normally a connection attempt keeps the user waiting a long time before notifying the attempt was futile anyway.

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What about connecting to the target machine and port over tcp/ip and seeing if theres something listening there. I often telnet to a port just to see if something accepts the connection. –  Sam Jul 7 at 4:54
    
that might work, but creates other code than the standard database connection library, plus it doesn't guarantee the database will accept your connection –  Jorrit Reedijk Jul 7 at 8:33

2 Answers 2

up vote 7 down vote accepted

You haven't mentioned what database you are connecting to, however. In SQL Server 2005, from .NET, you can specify a connection timeout in your connection string like so:

server=<server>;database=<database>;uid=<user>;password=<password>;Connect Timeout=3

This will try to connect to the server and if it doesn't do so in three seconds, it will throw a timeout error.

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up vote 2 down vote

Shorten the timeout on the connection string and execute something trivial.

The wait should be about the same as the timeout.

You would still need a second or two though.

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