I'm trying to connect to a database supplied by a vendor. I have read-only access. Every tool I use (SQLWorkbench, DBeaver, etc...) refuses to connect using the jconn4 drivers with an error message along the lines of:
Metadata accessor information was not found on this database. Please install the required tables as mentioned in the jConnect documentation.
Normally the fix is easy. Run:
ALTER DATABASE Upgrade JCONNECT ON
Unfortunately in this instance, I only have read-only access and the vendor refuses to turn it on. Apparently with good reason. I took a snapshot of the Windows server, then did a few tricks in the background to get access to the database with read/write privileges and ran the command. Then I restarted the database server. Every client that uses the database started crashing and throwing bizarre errors. I rolled back to the backup and called the vendor and played dumb. They immediately knew the issue and said "somehow someone turned on metadata accessor tables--good thing you had a backup" and that was the end of it.
Is it possible to access the database without turning on those tables? Are they specifically related to using jconn4 for connecting? Is there another way to connect? (I don't pretend to understand anything about the jconn4 library or Sybase--I rabidly dislike both things). Ideally I would love to be able to browse tables and key relationships with a GUI, but I'd settle for just being able to execute SQL commands and get results while testing.