How to connect to remote MS SQL Server?

Question

I use:
Class.forName("sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver");
Connection con = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:odbc:iweb",userid,passwd);
to connect to my "iweb" database on MS SQL Server running locally. Works great.
But now I want to connect to this same database that is now running on a remote MS SQL Server
on port 1433 of a machine with IP address 123.456.789.123.
What is the magic incantation to make this happen? I have been trying variations of:
Class.forName("sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver");
String conString = "jdbc:odbc:DRIVER={SQL Server};SERVER=123.456.789.123:1433;"
+ "DATABASE=iweb;UID=" userid ";PWD=" passwd ";";
Connection con = DriverManager.getConnection(conString);
but no joy. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Surely this is a common problem
but I'm having a heck of a time finding helpful docs that spell it out.
-Dave Maffitt [email protected]

Answer 1

Configuring a local DSN to point to the remote server is a good solution, but, I am still puzzled by something. On page 216 of Core Java 2, Volume 2, Advanced Features, there is an example of a database URL using a network address as part of the value. The example reads in part:
For example: jdbc:odbc://whitehouse.gov:5000/CATS;PWD=Hillary
would connect to the CATS database on port 5000 of whitehouse.gov using ODBC attribute value of PWD set to "Hillary".
This example is what lead me to believe that I might be able to connect to a remote Data Source if I had the right syntax in the URL. My attempts at duplicating this example with my own MS SQL Server 7.0 database are failing. Have you tried this with any success?