FreeTDS Development Group

[Brian Bruns <camber AT ais.org>]

On Fri, 10 Nov 2000, Mark Schaal wrote:

> What I understand "connection level" to mean, and I could be wrong,
> is that the user could specify per connection "I want you to mimic
> little/big-endian".  However, the only need I am aware of is to 
> mimic little-endian on big-endian machine for TDS7.0 connections,
> which we can auto-detect and set properly without user intervention.

Not entirely true.  Some (all?) versions of SQL Server 7 have broken dates
and money.  They send in little endian regardless of what was requested.
If Microsoft fixes this in a service pack then, when talking to 7.0 SP1
freetds needs to correct but for SP3 (or other mythical bug fix version)
we must not fix it.  There is no way to tell server version really, other
than a compile time option.  So the best way to handle this may be to flat
emulate little endian with TDS 4.2. 

So, a TDS 4.2 connection to SQL Server may need to talk little endian and
a TDS 4.2 connection to Sybase may need to be native (big endian) format.

This is what I meant by allowing per connection endianess may be a good
idea.  Microsoft doesn't really appear to give a hoot about big endian
clients, and it's not likely to get any better.  It's has no use in TDS
5.0, I'll agree.