ArcGIS Interface via OLE DB Connection

I have just been working with a customer who wanted to interface their ArcGIS system with ZP SQL to pull across live violation data. There are a couple of ways to interface with SQL data in ArcGIS. This customer had success creating an OLE DB Connection to the data. These connections are contained in ArcCatalog under the Database Connections option in the Catalog Tree. You can double click on the "Microsoft OLE  DB Provider for SQL Server" to set up the connection. You'll need some information from us to do this including your server name, database name, user name and password. Once the connection is made you can expand the new connection node to view all the available tables. In this case I advised pulling data from the "vViolaterep" table which combines data from the Violations and Property databases. He was then able to use the common parcel number field to join this table with his address shapefile to produce new maps layers.