If you are experiencing difficulties with connection speed to your AutoCAD Electrical Access MDB catalog database, it could be beneficial to switch to an SQL database instead, which was made available in the 2017 release.

Create your catalog and footprint databases on a Microsoft® SQL™ Server, and then migrate your catalog data information from your Microsoft® Access database to an SQL Server database.

Start the Migration Workflow

Connect to an SQL Server

1. In the SQL Server Link, navigate and select the appropriate server instance for your SQL Server connection.
2. Under Authentication, either:
   a. Use the Windows authentication.
   b. Use SQL Server authentication. Enter your user name and password.
3. Click Next.

The connection to the SQL Server instance gets established.

Create Database on an SQL Server

1. Select the Create catalog database, and then enter the name for your catalog database on SQL Server.
2. Select the Create footprint database, and then enter the name for your footprint database on SQL Server.
3. Click Create.

The catalog and footprint databases are now created on the SQL Server.

Note: You can either continue with your data migration workflow from Access to SQL Server or you can come back later to do the data migration.

Migrate Data to an SQL Server

1. Select Provide source for catalog database, and then browse to navigate to your source catalog database (.mdb)
2. Select Provide source for footprint database, and then browse to navigate to your source footprint database (.mdb)
3. Click Migrate.

Working with an SQL server database will speed up connection time and also allow multiple users to edit the database at the same time.