I have seen the Zope adapter require a different form of connection string from the ODBC driver. It was for either Interbase or mySQL, I forget which. Read the docs for the adapter very carefully and hope someone else has the answer, because I don't remember anymore what worked in my case,and that may be different from yours. For example, you might have to specify a host for the database server. [florian reiser] I have a computer running W2k and Zope 2.4.1. However when I try to access a VFP7 database through ZODBCDA, I get the error message: Invalid connection string. But the System DSN works!! I've tested it with Excel. With zope I can connect to an Excel sheet through an appropriate DSN, too. The id of the DSN and the DSN in zope is the same. The connection does not work, even when I try to create a new ODBC connection object. So what's wrong?