Just want to document a strange issue I had today. I have this small Python program that uses the pyodbc library to connect to an SQL Server database on my local machine. The code was working fine two weeks ago before I left it to work on a different project. Below is the simplified version of the code in which pyodbc is used to read data from SQL Server 2022:

When I tried running it today, it did not work. I had the following error instead:

pyodbc.OperationalError: ('HYT00', '[HYT00] [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Login timeout expired (0) (SQLDriverConnect)')

While it looks like a network issue, there has been no change to my laptop or home network. Looking up this error on the internet does not seem to give me any solution to the issue.

However, this article suggests we can use ODBC driver with pyodbc. My ODBC Data Source (found in Windows’ Control Panel) showed that I have ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server.

So, I changed my driver as in the example below and it worked fine:

I could not find out what caused the previous driver (SQL Driver) to stop working.

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