Aptana Studio 3 – Beta – SQL Explorer : Could not connect to your database alias


August 4th, 2010

I have been an avid user of Aptana Studio 2 for some time now and have used SQL Explorer within it a lot as well – because lets face it – having an SQL editor within your development environment is extremely productive if you are a web developer.

In order to keep up with the constant motion of life long learning I upgraded Aptana Studio 2 to version 3 Beta.

It’s slick. I like it a lot!

However I did run into an issue where SQL Explorer refused to connect to my remote MySQL server.

The exact error message was:

Could not connect to your database alias; the exact message was:
Cannot connect to Dev/root. Check your URL

This annoyed me for a good long while – even to the point that I was considering rolling back to version 2 of Aptana. It turns out that the reason I could not connect was due to the fact that I did not specify the database name at the end of my connection details.

i.e my connection string was this:
jdbc:mysql://192.168.2.5:3306

But it should have been this:
jdbc:mysql://192.168.2.5:3306/mysql

See the difference? The second string has “/mysql” on the end. In essence “/mysql” could actually be any database contained on the server you are connecting to.

SQL Explorer in Aptana Studio 2 never made the database part of the connection string compulsory. This most probably has more to do with SQL Explorer than Aptana – but the two work in tandem so I cannot rule it out. As I cannot compare version numbers (my old Aptana Studio 2 install has been blown away) – I will never know for sure if this was simply an update to SQL Explorer or some Aptana interference.

It also seems like there is NO ONE out to the interwebs talking about SQL Explorer for Eclipse and Aptana – the reasons for which I cannot explain. I had tried searching for resolutions to this issue before but found very limited references to SQL Explorer.

So, there you have it.

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Categories: General, Programming

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