ADO Vs ODBC in DAX 2009

There are two very popular ways in DAX to get data from an external data into AX in some fashion. These are ADO and ODBC. The first item to note is that ADO cannot be used by a batch job because, behind the scenes, this is a COM component and those can't be used by the batch job system. So, if you want to use a batch job to grab data, you should use ODBC.  The next issue that may arise is that ODBC DSN's come in two flavors: 32 bit and 64 bit. The AX client is 32 bit but many application and DB servers are now 64 bit. a 32 bit and a 64 bit DSN are not the same and aren't interchangeable. Another issue is if you are using ODBC to fetch some records, process them in some way into AX then mark them in the orginal data source as "processed", with ODBC, things can get complicated. You will need one connection to get the data, then another to manipulate the data in its source DB. Below are some links to help.

 

Links:

Error: Data source name not found and no default driver specified
Selecting Records from an External Database
Execute a SQL Stored Procedure