FreeTDS Development Group

[Brian Bruns <camber AT ais.org>]

I've put together a draft of an announcement for 0.52 that I'll be sending
to various forums.  It's probably a little rough but that's were you come
in! ;-)  Hopefully my abuse of the english language isn't too severe (I'm
a native speaker, honest).  I haven't sent one of these out really for
previous releases, and probably wouldn't but I hearing how people they
knew who freetds might be helpful were totally unaware of its existence.
So I figured maybe this would help get the word out.

I'd like to personally thank everyone that has sent in patches, worked on
the documentation, submitted lucid bug reports, and so on.  I felt like
things are really coming together in the last few months.  The goals for
0.53 are already coming together nicely, I'm just hoping the next release
doesn't take 8 more months...

Steve, how much time do you need to make the deb's? I could tag CVS and
then give it a few days or so if that is sufficient...I'll be trying to
fudge my way through making RPMs anyway. :-)

Anyway, without further adieu:

---------------------------------------------------

The FreeTDS Project is proud to announce the availability of FreeTDS 0.52

FreeTDS is a open re-implementation of the TDS (Tabular DataStream) Protocol 
used by Sybase and Microsoft in their database products.  Specifically, 
FreeTDS
allows Linux and Unix machines to act as clients to a Microsoft SQL Server, 
Sybase ASE or ASA dataserver and related products. 

FreeTDS supports a range of protocol dialects from both vendors and three 
client
APIs (dblib, ctlib, and ODBC).

New features in this release include:

. Major enhancements to the ODBC driver allowing it to work with the unixODBC 
  and iODBC driver managers as well as working with PHP and Perl ODBC 
  interfaces.
. New configuration file format for finer grained control.  The older 
  'interfaces' format is retained as a fallback for Sybase compatibility.
. Preliminary connection pooling code.
. Better documentation.
. FreeTDS is now 64bit clean.
. Added support for nullable bit types under TDS 7.0
. Many, many bug fixes.

Source packages or RPMs for FreeTDS 0.52 can be obtained at iBiblio or any of 
its mirror sites:

ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/ALPHA/freetds/freetds-0.52.tgz
ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/ALPHA/freetds/freetds-0.52-1.i386.rpm

For more information on the FreeTDS project or the related FreeTDS/JDBC 
native 
Java driver please visit http://www.freetds.org