FreeTDS Development Group

[Brian Bruns <camber AT umcc.ais.org>]

Well, it looks like things are working for TDS 7.0 support and everything
is in CVS.

First off though, I have to give Microsoft credit for extending the
protocol in a very thoughtful manner.  They made the task of managing to
support all 3 versions of the protocol in one library fairly easy.  

Naturally not all of the protocol is supported in this first pass.  The
notable things:

. text/image is most likely broken, but should be easy to fix when I get
  around to it.
. there is no unicode support.  strings are 'converted' from ascii to 
  unicode and back where required.  There is a new function
  'tds_get_string()' which should be called anywhere a unicode string is
  possible.  In the future the CLIs (dblib/ctlib/ODBC) should be able to
  specify whether the strings will be stripped or be retained in unicode
  form.
. lots o' magic numbers still.  I'm hoping this will shake out eventually.
. There may be some problem using dblib/ctlib clients against MS SQL w/
  TDS 7.0 when returning long varchars. older clients may (rightfully)
  expect no more than 255 character to be bound to a variable, which could
  cause core dumps and other nastys when getting larger columns.  So far
  sqsh seems to hold up well, I'll try to test DBD::Sybase and PHP when I
  get a chance.
. Probably other stuff I haven't found yet!

Oh and one last thing, I've added a environment variable 'TDSVER' which
will allow overriding the compile time default for TDS version.  Possible
values are (42, 46, 50, and 70).  Setting the version programmatically
(dbsetversion and the like) is still the final decider though.

Once this is stable and bulk copy is fully implemented I'm going to
release a new version...with all the new stuff (writetext, bulk copy, TDS 
7.0) I'm thinking of bumping the number up...maybe 0.60? any objections?

After that I'd like to get a functional ODBC, get the docs fixed up
(anyone want to volunteer?), fix the lingering build problems, and
shoot for a 1.0 release sometime next year.

Brian