FreeTDS Development Group

[Mark Schaal <mark AT champ.tstonramp.com>]

> 
> 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.
> 

I didn't realize that SQLServer7 was broken under TDS4.2.  My point (and
I do have one :) still is that optimally we don't want to put the burden
on the end user of figuring out that they need to flip a magic switch 
to get their connection to work.  So here's another suggestion - could
we use the login ack packet to grok the server type?  The below comes
from MSSQL 7.0 SP2, and the 0700 in the magic bytes is certainly
suggestive.  If we could get MSSQL login acks from a few other sources
and compare we could see if there's a pattern.

TDS Response -- Login acknowledgement (0xAD)
  Ack:          01
  Version:      4.2.0000
  Text1:        'Microsoft SQL Server' (22)
  Magic1:       5f0700ff (4)

Another option, although it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, is to
force all TDS4.2 connections to mimic little-endian.

Mark
-- 
Mark J. Schaal                                  Phone:      (909) 620-7724
TST On Ramp                                     Fax:        (909) 620-8174
System Administrator                            E-Mail: mark AT tstonramp.com