FreeTDS Development Group

["Lowden, James K" <LowdenJK AT bernstein.com>]

Hi everyone, 

I just left a meeting where I was told that there was "no way" to connect
our Solaris (or might be Digital Unix) box to MS SQL Server 2000.  It was
news to me. ;)  

After some questioning, I think the speaker meant that Sybase's ct-lib can't
connect to 2000.  The assertion is that MS SQL Server 2000 has no support
for 4.2 (or, of course 5.0) connections.  Is that in fact true?  Can
Sybase's Solaris ct-lib client connect to MS SQL Server 2000, or not?  

We currently use Sybperl, DBD::Sybase, and some home-grown C programs, all
linked to Sybase ct-lib, to connect to our Sybase and SQL Server 7.0
servers.  It works OK if we avoid some things, like decimal/numeric
datatypes.  

We are testing something called DirectConnect, which by rights should be
called IndirectConnect.  It's an OpenServer gateway that runs on NT, I'm
told.  It lacks bcp support, without which it's about as useful to me as
day-old bread.  

If you were trying to do high-volume robust bcp loads from a Unix host to a
MS 2000 database, what would you use?  (Anyone who says "Oracle" is asking
for trouble!)

FreeTDS is a possibility, but its bcp logic would have to be amplified to
include host variable and transaction support.    If you think it's really
the best answer, though, that's information, too.  

Many thanks, 

--jkl