FreeTDS Development Group

[Steven Campbell <scampbel AT jamedia.com>]

Hello. My company has a SQL Server 7.0 SP3 servers, Windows NT 4.0
servers running ColdFusion 4.0 that use M$'s ODBC drivers et al to drive
a ColdFusion application. 

I have another process running on OpenBSD 2.9, FreeTDS 0.52, Apache
1.3.20 and PHP 4.0.6 that generates PDF files that outside users (in
front of our firewall) use to download Clipping Labels to PDF files. The
FreeTDS driver is using TDS 7.0 because many of the tables I need to
print are in TEXT columns. None of the columns in the Clipping_Label
table are type TEXT.

The portion of the application that is at issue right now is ColdFusion
sublaunching Crystal Reports to print a Press Clipping Label. The issues
I'm having are: When outside users are using the OpenBSD boxen to
generate PDF files, the stored procedures and queries on the ColdFusion
equipment stall for up to two minutes. ColdFusion doesn't seem to handle
other (foreign) clients connecting and using tables while it's trying to
do its updates and such. The issues are that we can't afford this kind
of stall, and need stuff to be printed nonstop.

Network connectivity, database and the ColdFusion servers have been
tested for performance bottlenecks, but this problem only occurs when
the OpenBSD machines connect to the SQL Server and generate the PDF
files. I have attempted to solve the problems by feeding the PHP script
locking hints like so:

$query = "UPDATE Clipping_Label WITH(UPDLOCK, REPEATABLEREAD) SET
Fax_Status = 'P' WHERE Label_ID IN ( $LABEL_ID )";

This has no effect on the performance of the ColdFusion stuff. 

I have also rewritten the stored procedures that the ColdFusion
equipment runs to generate the Crystal Reports reports.

These haven't worked out. Any other suggestions on how I can muddle with
the locking between NT's ODBC drivers and FreeTDS?

TIA,

Steven Campbell,
Chief Developer,
J&A Media Services,
300 John St.
Suite 500,
Thornhill, ON, Canada
M5A4J3