How does MS Project 2003 open projects from an ODBC connection?

[ProjectDev]

We are testing Project 2003 in opening projects from a SQL Server 2000
database. Currently our users are using Project 2000 to connect to this
database.

Though its slow at times, Project 2000 never errors out when opening a
project. However, whenever a user is working remotely or physically far away
from the database, with Project 2003, we get the error "An unexpected error
has occurred. The document table cannot be opened."

It is very frustrating because we were at the point of deploying Project
2003 to our users - but cannot now because of this error. We have been
advised (including from this group) to move to a Citrix/Terminal Services
solution for our users.

While we investigate the costs involved with such a solution, I would like
to understand how MS Project 2003 opens a project from the database. Our
users do not have problems listing the projects from the SQL Server database.
It is when opening the projects that the error occurs, after a very long
time. Changing the SQL Server driver timeout has no effect. We know that
Project can connect to SQL Server fine since it can list all the projects
from the database.

What I want to understand is what "Verifying tables ..." means. This seems
to be the first message that gets displayed when a project opens. The users
who have the error never see this message. Oddly enough I am the only one who
does not see the error - even when I am working remotely. This tells me that
there may be some configurable option that could be changed.

Any ideas would be welcome.

 

[ProjectDev]

OK - an update.

We were testing a remote user's opening projects. This user was getting the
error when opening projects. We discovered that he could open projects fine
from our test server - but could not open them from our production server.

We have configured the ODBC data source names with a fully qualified DNS
name. However - when opening a project on the user's computer - he would get
a SQL Server Login error. The server listed as the actual computer name where
the SQL Server database lived, not it's domain name.

In other words, say the SQL Server computer's name was "ProductionSvr" and
it's domain name is data.company.com. We configured the ODBC DSN to access
"data.company.com" - not ProductionSvr. However, when the user was trying to
open a project - he would get a SQL Server error listing ProductionSvr as the
server.

To workaround that problem, we had to add "company.com" to the list of DNS
suffixes for the users TCP/IP configuration so that the server name would
resolve to productionsvr.company.com - which seemed to work. The user now can
open projects from our production database.

The question is - why would Project translate "data.company.com" back to the
actual computer name? Does that even happen in Project? This is why I would
like to understand the sequence of steps in how Project opens a project from
a SQL Server database.

 

[ProjectDev]

Issue solved!

Adding the proper DNS suffix to the list under the user's TCP/IP properties
solved the issue.

Apparently Project 2003 (most likely it changed with 2002) changed how
domain names are resolved when trying to access data from a database server.
I'm still not exactly sure why it is resolving a domain name to its local
Windows name - but adding the proper DNS suffix fixed it. Apparently - it was
searching to find the right way to get to the database server and it kept
timing out with the "The document table could not be opened" error.

This was definitely not an easy one to figure out.