FreeTDS Development Group

["James K. Lowden" <jklowden AT speakeasy.org>]

Bradley Bell wrote:
> 
> Hi, when selecting a datetime value using freetds, I get values such as:
> "Dec 13 2001 05:58PM"
> Whereas the same select statement in the MS SQL Query analyzer give:
> "2001-12-13 17:58:55.000"
> 
> Since I need to be able to convert back and forth between datetime values
> and unix timestamps, I need to at least have the number of seconds
> (millisecs don't matter).
> 
> Is this a problem in FreeTDS, or a limitation of the TDS protocol, or what?
> Is it possible to make FreeTDS always return the number of seconds in
> datetime fields?

Brad, 

MS SQL Query Analyzer is an ODBC tool.  It's default datetime display is
controlled by some ODBC settings.  I don't know the details.  

To illustrate, try Microsoft's isql command-line tool.  I think you'll
find it represents datetimes the way, say, sqsh does.  

> (I don't want to use CONVERT, because the select statements in this
> application should remain portable)

If the server is consistent (always MS SQL Server or Sybase), the most
portable way probably *is* to coerce the format with convert.  

Regards, 

--jkl