FreeTDS Development Group

["Michael Hudin" <hudin AT zoetrope.com>]

I have finally come to the conclusion after fighting with my current
FreeTDS installation (Apache 1.3, Perl 5.6.1, FreeTDS .53, DBD Sybase .94,
Red Hat 7.2, MSSQL Server 7.0 SP4) to get it to pull BLOBS out of the
database, that it just isn't going to work and was set up incorrectly. 
Yes, I have tried $dbh->do("set textsize=xxx") and "set textsize" in the
conf file, but it hasn't worked and I can't seem to get the system to work
under protocol 7.0, (4.2 does work, but with the BLOB problem) without it
giving me a segfault.

If anyone has an answer to the above question, I'm all ears, but at this
point, I beleive that there is something fundamentally wrong with my
system since the tech who did this hadn't done it before, and so I am
going to build up another server.  Now, I have a questions regarding the
implementation.  First off, should I wait for the .54 (or .65) release
that seems to be on its way?  Will this include additional and potentially
very useful ODBC support for my setup?

Which of the database modules should I use?  I realize that most people
who are using Perl are using the Sybase module, but I was wondering if
anyone had any input on which is best between DBD-Sybase, unixODBC, iODBC,
or Openlink's software?  I am a little concerned with the DBD-Sybase
module and using wildcards to insert large files into the database.  My
system has a tremendous amount of BLOB insertion from the users and I need
to have this work.  We are currently using wildcards to get this to work
on our MS NT server, but I have read wildcards are not possible in
DBD-Sybase and was wondering is anyone can confirm or deny this rumor, or
if they are possible, tell me the workaround.

Eventually I am going to try and use more PHP scripts on our sites.  Will
most of the systems that I will set up for Perl crossover, or are there
things that I need to take into account when building the system that will
allow PHP to access the MSSQL database?

Thanks for any advice and words of wisdom,

-michael