Customer is using Visual COBOL for Visual Studio 2.0 to create a native COBOL application that uses embedded SQL to access a SQL Server database through ODBC.  The ODBC DSN has been setup to use the SQL Server driver and the Text Connect button is successful in the ODBC Administrator.  When the customer starts OpenESQL Assistant in Visual Studio it correctly displays the list of available DSNs and when they are expanded the list of tables is also displayed.  When a table is checked and the Assistant tries to display the columns it displays an error that no columns are defined for the table.  What is the problem?

Check to see if the ODBC DSN is using an out of date SQL Server ODBC driver. You should upgrade to use SQL Server Native Client 10.0 or later instead of the standard driver for SQL Server. What happened is that in Visual COBOL 2.0 OpenESQL changed the default behavior to mainframe and the Assistant was built with that default. For older driver’s this became an issue because the Assistant does some special API calls into the OpenESQL runtime and the driver doesn’t like a null pointer. This isn’t an issue with the later SQL Server ODBC drivers like the Native Client 10.0 oir higher. The issue has also been fixed in Visual COBOL 2.1 by building the Assistant with the BEHAVIOR=UNOPTIMIZED directive.