Starting to use FreeTDS (alt approach)

Leon Brooks leon at cclinic.com.au
Thu Sep 12 10:37:29 EDT 2002


On Thu, 12 Sep 2002 01:32, Magnus Ahl wrote:
> Our company is about to embrace the use of FreeTDS in our software, mainly
> for communication with Microsoft SQL Server 2000. We use C++ as a coding
> standard for our CGI applications and up till today we have only used a
> MySQL database. Our intentions is to replace our own MySQL.cc base class
> with a wrapper which in turn decides if to use the MySQL or TDS library in
> runtime.

PostgreSQL is adequate for much that MS-SQL does, and better at some things 
(licencing charges do spring to mind, but I'm speaking in technical terms). 
If you have MS apps which must talk to the DB, PostgreSQL offers good SQL 
standards support and a variety of interfaces including ODBC. I've used it in 
a number of places where MySQL simply isn't feature-complete enough and 
MS-SQL has disqualified itself on other grounds (generally security, cost, 
requiring Windows, requiring huge hardware in that order). One QANGO here in 
Western Australia has begun moving an MS-Access application across to 
PostgreSQL from MS-SQL and is simultaneously Zopeifying the application end.

FreeTDS is particularly useful for draining an MS-SQL database onto another 
server as editable text (SQL) commands. I've used this for backup as well as 
for conversion.

Cheers; Leon

-- 
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