ODBC Error: Key value must not contain any of the following characters:...

[precisonline]

Just spent a bunch of time helping a client work through a weird situation with the Unidata ODBC driver.  Anytime they'd go through to make a connection through Excel, it would prompt for authentication, let them select the columns to import and the destination cell where the information would go, and then an error would popup with this message:

[Ardent][Unidata ODBC Driver]Key value must not contain any of the following characters: []{}();?*=!@

Subsequent web searches turned up next to nothing (which is why I'm documenting it here).  The keys to the records to be returned did NOT have any of these characters in there, yet the error persisted through several different variations and attempts.

On a lark, we tried a different user ID and password and got past the message.  Come to find out, the PASSWORD cannot have any of these characters when trying to use ODBC to access Unidata data through Excel.

FYI

[Tom Pellitieri]

[Ardent] ?

Was this an older version of UniData/UniData ODBC?  We're using UniData 6.1 on AIX 5.3.  The ODBC driver on my Windows client is identified as IBM UniData ODBC Driver version 3.01.05.7073 dated 6/11/2004.

--Tom

[precisonline]

True, and we upgraded to the newest version and [Ardent] was replaced by [IBM].  Still had the same problem though.