Craig Talbert's Weblog

I setup ServiceNow's ODBC driver and then setup a Linked Server to connect to one of our ServiceNow instances from SQL Server Management Studio. When you run a SQL query from SSMS on your ServiceNow instance and check the v_user_session table, it seems to be using SOAP to pull the data and then doing any necessary work for joins or aggregates in the driver code.

We've been trying to troubleshoot some problems where data that's in an instance database doesn't always show up in the view mappings of particular tables (the .do URLs also used for the SOAP interface). I've always thought of ODBC drivers as connecting "directly" to a given database, but in this case the driver connects to the model (database) through the view. I have to say it's a pretty creative approach, I wouldn't have thought of implementing an ODBC driver in that way.