FreeTDS Development Group

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

> From: Michael Peppler [mailto:mpeppler AT peppler.org]
> Sent: May 21, 2002 4:59 PM
> 
> On Tue, 2002-05-21 at 13:45, Lowden, James K wrote:
> > 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?  
> 
> AFAIK this is correct. However, DBlib apps may still work.

Why would db-lib apps work?  I thought it was a TDS issue.  Possibly having
to do with dropping ascii support at the protocol level (in favor of UCS-2).


> > 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.  
> 
> Well - bcp is not transactional (or at least not really), and doesn't
> support host variables (at least not if I understand what you mean by
> that).

I see.  You're saying bcp is "not transactional" because the data don't hit
the tranlog, so there's no rollback/rollforward and such for recovery and
backup.  I should have said "bcp has to support batches".  

Right now, FreeTDS writes the whole file as one batch.  If there's a glitch
in the data, the batch is not committed, and in fact "sp_who" will show the
spid's status as "rollback".  In such a case, process will remained blocked
for an inordinately long time, much longer than it took to upload the rows.
So, we need bcp batch support.  :)

By "host variables", I mean feeding the bcp API with bound memory variables,
rather than from a file.  You know, bcp_bind, bcp_sendrow, and friends.  

Thanks for the reply, Michael.  Your name came up, you won't be surprised to
hear.  

--jkl