About ColdFusion Data Sources

For ColdFusion developers, the term data source can refer to a number of different types of structured content accessible locally or across a network. You can query Web sites, LDAP servers, POP mail servers, and documents in a variety of formats. Most commonly though, a database drives your applications, so for this discussion, a data source is defined as the entry point for database operations.

Before you can access a database with a ColdFusion application, you must configure the database as a ColdFusion data source or use an existing ODBC data source. You do this using the Data Sources page in the ColdFusion Administrator.

Note

On the Win32 platform, you can also configure ODBC data sources with the ODBC Data Source Administrator.

The specific databases that you can configure for ColdFusion depend on two items:

The platform on which you install ColdFusion Server
The edition of ColdFusion that you are running-Professional or Enterprise.

When you first open the ColdFusion Administrator, you see four ODBC data sources already configured for use by ColdFusion:

cfsnippets Used by the executable code examples. You access the examples through pages in the CFML Language Reference and through the Snippets Launcher, which you access from the ColdFusion welcome page.
cfx Used by the example applications optionally installed with ColdFusion Server.
CompanyInfo Used by the examples in Developing Web Applications with ColdFusion.
GlobalCorpDB Used by the example applications optionally installed with ColdFusion Server.

Installing and Configuring ColdFusion Server
Managing Data Sources