FreeTDS Development Group

["Roger Feeley" <rfeeley AT bridge.com>]

I don’t know if this interests you, but there is now a sniffer-like device 
that includes decodes some of the TDS protocol.

There is a small company called Frontline Test Equipment that has been 
making PC based protocol analyzers for a long time.  I have been dealing 
with these folks for about 12 years now and have developed a good 
friendship with them.  The protocol decodes for their LAN analyzer product, 
Ethertest, are done with a proprietary language instead of hard coded.  It 
is a simple matter for them to add another protocol to their product.

When the TDS docs became available, I arranged with Frontline to be one of 
their first custom decode guinea pigs.  Basically, they gave me two days of 
decode programmer time which got me decodes for a number of the basic 
messages.  I can see who is connected, requests, responses and a few other 
things.  If I can sell this to my management, we can go farther yet.

Some features that Ethertest brings to the table:
1. The ability to quickly add custom decodes.
2. The ability to generate messages.  Since this product lives at the 
Ethernet level, you can fill in any address you like to make it look to a 
Sybase server like the message came from a client that is long gone.
3. The ability to filter messages.  Watch only the conversations you want.
4. Data logging to the capacity of your hard drive.
5. Playback of logged data

Features that can be added (for a price) but are not currently scheduled:
1. The ability to pass decoded frames out to an external process for custom 
displays not written by Frontline.
2. A Frontline written custom display that will show the equivalent of 
sp_who from a network perspective.  Who is connected, who has a transaction 
going, what was the request, and how many response frames have been 
returned.

There is one other product out there, the Zero Impact SQL Monitor, but it 
is $25,000 and is licensed for a single Sybase server.  Ethertest is $1700 
(price goes way down with quantity) and is licensed like a protocol 
analyzer.  Take it wherever you want and watch whatever you want as much as 
you want.

The FTE folks were a bit concerned about the document license so they had 
their lawyers look at it.  The lawyers feel that, since this is a 
diagnostic tool and isn't to be used for routine communications with a 
server, we are ok.