Open Dental Forum

For a couple of years now, I've been using an elaborate query to gather production statistics from OD that I put in a set of custom temporary tables. Then, using an ODBC connection that links these tables to an Excel spreadsheet, by the push of a button in Excel, I update my practice monitoring spreadsheet and get an accurate and up-to-date view of the situation, with all the bells and whistles I have programmed in Excel. This works perfectly when my laptop is connected to the clinic's LAN. So far so good.

Now, I would like to do the same when I work from home... I would like to connect my laptop to the clinic's MySQL database using this same ODBC link if possible, over a VPN I guess.

I'm no expert at networking and secure remote-access so I would appreciate some input from anyone with this kind of experience. Can an ODBC connection work over a VPN network? (I was thinking of upgrading from Logmein Free to Hamachi to get this functionality). Are there other things to consider?

Thanks for your help!

Mifa

Yes, I connect to my db over vpn all the time. I have to use the ip address instead of computer name when specifying the db location. I have a VPN router which does take some fiddling to get to work.