[freetds] SQL Server 2005 / 2008 support

Sebastien FLAESCH sf at 4js.com
Thu Dec 13 03:57:52 EST 2007


Dear all,

I am new to this mailing list and want to introduce myself and our product / company.

My name is Sebastien FLAESCH and I am in charge of the database interfaces at Four J's Development Tools.

Our product is a Informix 4gl compatible compiler / runtime system.

I wrote all database interfaces to:
  - Oracle (OCI),
  - DB2 UDB (CLI),
  - SQL Server (ODBC and Native Client),
  - PostgreSQL (libpq),
  - MySQL (libmysqlclient),
  - Sybase ASA (dblib*),
  - ANTs (ODBC).

We have a large customer base using Informix and some of them want to migrate to SQL Server, but keeping the apps on Unix.

We already had a look at DataDirect drivers - working quite well by the way - but license is too expensive for our customers.

Now we started to look at FreeTDS...

Understand we do not just write a light driver to let 4gl programmers do a few SELECT / INSERT / UPDATE / DELETE statements;
We talk about a supporting a complex OLTP application programming language (Informix 4gl).

We need a full support of ODBC (or any other API that gives us the chance to do what we want), with advanced features such as array-fetch, 
stored-procedure support (in/out params), blobs, etc.

To be honest I am a bit scared about the status of the FreeTDS project:

- Version is still alpha/beta (0.64) - when you compile FreeTDS you get a debug version by default.
- No scrollable cursors??? (this is very old stuff - now?)
- There is no official support for SQL Server 2005 / 2008 (only TDS 8.0)

PLEASE: What are the plans?

You guys probably know about SQL Server's Native Client that ships with SQL Server 9 (2005).
This one is supposed to replace the old ODBC driver one day, from my understanding.
Are they still using TDS with this Native Client? => Is TDS going to die?

Sorry to be direct but we need to be sure because if we suggest FreeTDS to our customers, it's for a while.


Thanks,
Sebastien FLAESCH
www.4js.com


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