In my last post, I discussed an issue where a connection to a database, via ODBC, is dropped when a network connection is intermittent.

This led me to search the Internet for similar situations and circumstances that other may have encountered. Nothing significant turned up, so I went to the source: Microsoft. Posting on their official forums, I laid out my case and got a response rather quickly:

I came up with a possible explanation. Your application is connecting to the SQL Server via DNS name “servername“. Every time you establish a connection your host name is resolved into an actual IP address which might have been the IP address of the bouncing network adapter. As soon as NIC lost the wireless network is was switched into a disabled mode dropping all the related connections.

Please confirm that this is not the case.

Interesting idea: the servername in the connection string must be resolved via DNS. I went right to my hosts file and added an entry for my local ip address and my machinename. Next, I disabled and enabled the wireless network connection. The result: success! No more dropped connections to the database.