FreeTDS Development Group

[Bradley Bell <bradleyb AT u.washington.edu>]

On Sun, Dec 16, 2001 at 08:11:05PM -0500, James K. Lowden wrote:
> 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.  

isql uses db-lib, so maybe this is a limitation of db-lib?

> > (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.

It needs to be portable to several different backends.  MS/Sybase is the
only one that seems to need a custom select statement for timestamp/datetime
values.  I see that when freetds is being used as an odbc driver, it also
returns:  (with unixodbc's isql)
SQL> select getdate();
+--------------------+
| Dec 17 2001 12:28PM|
+--------------------+
That's not right, is it?

-brad

-- 
Bradley Bell
Computer Support Analyst
University of Washington
Classroom Support Services