FreeTDS Development Group

["Sam Sam" <s4m AT lycos.com>]

Hi Guys,
I've been using FreeTDS as connection driver between PHP 4.0 and MS SQL 7.0.  
Now I'm playing with IBM's product Websphere 3.5, VA Java but our main 
database still use MS SQL 7.0.

My question is can I use FreeTDS as connection driver between EJB in the 
websphere and MS SQL 7.0 ?? Now we're using jdbc.app as a connection driver 
from Websphere to DB2.. but we want our EJB in the websphere connect to our 
MS SQL 7.0, could it be possible ?? I've been searching in freetds.org and 
haven't got any clue...

Any suggestions would be very appreciated...

Thanks,
Sam


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From jklowden AT speakeasy.org Fri Jul 13 22:57:58 2001
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All, 

For those whose eyes didn't glaze over when last we talked about Greek
characters and UTF-8 and Unicode and etc., I'm forwarding a message from
my friend Michael, who was born in Greece and is much too smart for his
own good.  

I don't remember how our discussion was resolved, or even if indeed it
had a useful conclusion, but I found Michael's explication helpful.  I
hope you do, too.  

--jkl


Jim,

 Unicode, UTF-8, different chinese encodings - we will soon long for the
days when all we had to worry about was ASCII to EBCDIC.

 Most greek applications, win9x, NT, mac, unix etc, do not use unicode;
rather an 8 bit representation using characters 128-255 to map Greek.
The
problem is there are many such representations.

The most official one is ISO-8859-7 which is also known as ELOT 928 or
codepage 928. (ELOT is a Greek body similar to ANSI. Unix and Linux
systems almost always use that (According to the greek linux how-to
http://home.ichannel.gr/faq/Linux-greek-howto which you may find a bit
hard to read, but I'll be glad to translate the relevant portions)

M$ had to do things a bit different, ofcourse. Windows uses a set that
is
about 99% identical to 928, but the 1% difference is a frequently used
character (upper case A, punctuated). Argh. This is code page 1253.

Greek DOS applications simply use codepage 437 and depend on the user or
graphics card to have a Greek typeface. This is officially known as 737,
but there is no real support for 737 in any OS.

Macs use a prioprietary standard of their own.

Your Greek correspondent most certainly has a CP 928 or 1532
application.
If he is using NTEXT fields, then there should be an automatic
928->Unicode and Unicode->928 conversion, which may not be taking place
correctly due to a badly configured client (server configuration should
not be a problem). If he is using TEXT fields, then both client and
server
configuration is an issue; if the client is configured for a greek
codepage and the server defaulted to us-ascii, or v.v., things will
break,
since such a conversion would be lossy (characters 128-255 would get
junked, which appears to be the exact problem here).

Or, it could simply be a bug in the conversion routines.

I cannot imagine that this is a greek-only problem, these issues should
apply to all non-latin alphabet based languages...

Cheers,

Michael