How to: Test Remote SQL Connectivity easily

Got this one from Steve Rachui’s blog. It’s really a good one so I cross post it in order to give it more exposure.

Taken directly from his blog (and edited a bit):

Have you ever been troubleshooting a problem with remote SQL (proxy 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;
• Instead of the extension .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!

The program allows some tweaking as well, see the tab Provider:

The second tab Connection is where it all happens:

Thanks Steve for sharing! Much appreciated!