FreeTDS Development Group

["Brian Bruns" <camber AT ais.org>]

> hi all,
> i'm still confused, what's the different between freetds db-lib and ct-lib
> ?
> 
> regards,
> karina

jkl, this one should go in the faq...

DBLib was the original API provided by Sybase for SQL Server.  By
extension it was also supported by Microsoft during the period immediately
following their technology sharing arrangement (I say was, because
although MS still ships dblib it is deprecated and doesn't support TDS
versions beyond 4.2).

Sybase subsequently developed ct-lib as a replacement API.

Advantages of dblib:  the interface is fairly simple, code written with
dblib is small and compact.
Disadvantages: It doesn't support advanced features such as placeholders,
array binding, and so on.  It also suffers from some horrible name space
conflicts when use with other libraries (specifically the dbopen() call
when linked with any form of dbm, or the typedef of BYTE when linked with
several other libraries).

Advantages of ctlib: ctlib exposes all current capabilities of Adaptive
Server (the new name for SQL Server), and has a robust and well thought
out API.
Disadvantages: Because of this it can be a bit unwieldy to use.