FreeTDS Development Group

[Steve Langasek <vorlon AT netexpress.net>]

Antonio,

On Wed, 20 Jun 2001, Antonio Ognio wrote:

>      Well, I must admit i'm very happy with your response. I believe
> there's a need for this project and many people will be supporting at
> all levels starting with you. Thanks a lot, I'll be bugging you with
> silly newbie questions for some time.. hope to behave :)

>      Ok, definitely the real thing has to go in C. But there's a
> little problem: I'm not really fluent in C. I'll surely study all
> the sources and will do my best in learning more/hacking the C code
> you're providing me with.

If the final product will be written in C, it doesn't make sense to me to do a
prototype in PHP.  Because of all the binary structures you'll have to work
with, I think writing the conversion code in C (or perl) will be much easier
than writing it in PHP, and if it will be written in C in the end no matter
what, why write the code twice?

It's true that PHP will make it easy for you to send the SQL statements to the
PostgreSQL back-end, but it will also make it very hard for you to extract the
SQL statements from the TDS stream:  either you will have to rewrite all of
the FreeTDS server code in PHP, or you will have to compile it as a PHP
module.  In addition, PHP doesn't work very well as a language for daemons.
PostgreSQL provides client libraries, FreeTDS provides the server code you
need; it would be much easier, IMHO, to hook these two pieces together using C
code.  I think it would be worth your time to learn C for this reason.

HTH,
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer