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Sage 50 UK Icon Sage UK ODBC Driver

The Sage 50 UK ODBC Driver is a powerful tool that allows you to connect with live data from Sage 50 UK, directly from any applications that support ODBC connectivity.

Access Sage data like you would a database - read, write, and update Sage Customers, Transactions, Invoices, Sales Receipts, etc. through a standard ODBC Driver interface.

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Analyze Sage 50 UK Data in R


Create data visualizations and use high-performance statistical functions to analyze Sage 50 UK data in Microsoft R Open.

Access Sage 50 UK data with pure R script and standard SQL. You can use the CData ODBC Driver for Sage 50 UK and the RODBC package to work with remote Sage 50 UK data in R. By using the CData Driver, you are leveraging a driver written for industry-proven standards to access your data in the popular, open-source R language. This article shows how to use the driver to execute SQL queries to Sage 50 UK data and visualize Sage 50 UK data in R.

Install R

You can complement the driver's performance gains from multi-threading and managed code by running the multithreaded Microsoft R Open or by running R linked with the BLAS/LAPACK libraries. This article uses Microsoft R Open (MRO).

Connect to Sage 50 UK as an ODBC Data Source

Information for connecting to Sage 50 UK follows, along with different instructions for configuring a DSN in Windows and Linux environments.

Note: Only Sage 50 UK 2012 and above are supported.

The User and Password properties, under the Connection section, must be set to valid Sage 50 UK user credentials. These values will be the same used to log in to the Sage 50 UK software.

Additionally, the URL property, under the Connection section, will need to be set to the address of the company dataset desired. To obtain the address, do the following:

  1. If you have not already done so, open the Sage 50 UK software.
  2. Click Tools -> Internet Options.
  3. Select the SData Settings tab.
  4. Click the Details button next to Sage 50 Accounts. A window is displayed containing a list of company names along with the address to their corresponding datasets.
  5. Set the URL property to the value in the address field next to the company desired.

When you configure the DSN, you may also want to set the Max Rows connection property. This will limit the number of rows returned, which is especially helpful for improving performance when designing reports and visualizations.

Windows

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

Linux

If you are installing the CData ODBC Driver for Sage 50 UK in a Linux environment, the driver installation predefines a system DSN. You can modify the DSN by editing the system data sources file (/etc/odbc.ini) and defining the required connection properties.

/etc/odbc.ini

[CData Sage50UK Source] Driver = CData ODBC Driver for Sage 50 UK Description = My Description URL = http://your-server:5493/sdata/accounts50/GCRM/your-address User = Manager

For specific information on using these configuration files, please refer to the help documentation (installed and found online).

Load the RODBC Package

To use the driver, download the RODBC package. In RStudio, click Tools -> Install Packages and enter RODBC in the Packages box.

After installing the RODBC package, the following line loads the package:

library(RODBC)

Note: This article uses RODBC version 1.3-12. Using Microsoft R Open, you can test with the same version, using the checkpoint capabilities of Microsoft's MRAN repository. The checkpoint command enables you to install packages from a snapshot of the CRAN repository, hosted on the MRAN repository. The snapshot taken Jan. 1, 2016 contains version 1.3-12.

library(checkpoint) checkpoint("2016-01-01")

Connect to Sage 50 UK Data as an ODBC Data Source

You can connect to a DSN in R with the following line:

conn <- odbcConnect("CData Sage50UK Source")

Schema Discovery

The driver models Sage 50 UK APIs as relational tables, views, and stored procedures. Use the following line to retrieve the list of tables:

sqlTables(conn)

Execute SQL Queries

Use the sqlQuery function to execute any SQL query supported by the Sage 50 UK API.

tradingaccounts <- sqlQuery(conn, "SELECT Name, FinanceBalance FROM TradingAccounts", believeNRows=FALSE, rows_at_time=1)

You can view the results in a data viewer window with the following command:

View(tradingaccounts)

Plot Sage 50 UK Data

You can now analyze Sage 50 UK data with any of the data visualization packages available in the CRAN repository. You can create simple bar plots with the built-in bar plot function:

par(las=2,ps=10,mar=c(5,15,4,2)) barplot(tradingaccounts$FinanceBalance, main="Sage 50 UK TradingAccounts", names.arg = tradingaccounts$Name, horiz=TRUE)