FreeTDS Development Group

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

All, 

I expect to make a general announcement about 0.60 on Wednesday evening,
EST, barring problems encountered with rc1 in the next few days.  There is
one outstanding patch that probably should be included.  

Please have a go.  I was unable to upload the file to ibiblio tonight, so
I uploaded it to sourceforge, 

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=33106

I don't know all the machinations of sf.  Maybe my sparse comments will
wind up on freshmeat or something.  'Tis OK, whatever.  

Below is the announcement message I'm intending, and of the README.0.60
file that will be included in the distribution.  Please tell me if you
think they should be changed in any way. 
Many people have worked hard on this release, and we've benefited from
many careful participants who've sent patches and suggestions.  I'm very
glad to be part of the project, and happy to take part in making it
available to the world.  

--jkl 

+++
Text of the FreeTDS release 0.60 announcement
=============================================

With unbounded pride and pleasure, the developers, contributors, and other
partcipants of the FreeTDS project announce the arrival and delivery of 
FreeTDS 0.60.

FreeTDS is an open source implementation of the TDS (Tabular Data Stream)
protocol used by Sybase and Microsoft SQL Servers. It supports many
different flavors of the protocol and supports several APIs to access it.
FreeTDS works with other software such as Perl and PHP, providing
access from those languages as well. 

The FreeTDS C libraries are available under the terms of the Gnu LGPL
license.  

The FreeTDS project has seen quite a lot of activity lately and attracted
several new developers (perhaps not in that order).  On occasion in recent
months it has been ranked above the 95th percentile in activity, according
to
SourceForge statistics.  

With release 0.60, FreeTDS boasts:

*  Much improved support for Microsoft servers, including SQL Server 2000 
   datatypes and domain logins.  
   
*  Support and convertibility of all major datatypes.

*  Much expanded coverage of the ODBC API.  

*  An all-new BCP implementation, including host variable support.  

*  Character set conversions, via the iconv library.  

*  Threadsafe operation.  

The FreeTDS corner of the world wide web is www.freetds.org.  There you
will
find links to documentation, downloads, CVS access, as well as
instructions for
joining the mailing list.  

FreeTDS can be downloaded from ibiblio and its mirrors, and from
SourceForge
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/freetds/)

Below is the text of the README.0.60 file, included in the release
distribution.

[end announcement]

[begin README.0.60]
New location of installed files!
================================

With version 0.60, FreeTDS by default installs itself in the 
/usr/local tree.  You can of course override this location using the 
--prefix parameter of the configure script.  

Rationale:  Although we're not very passionate on the subject, we feel the
new
installation directory will be easier for new users to use, because they
won't
have to make adjustments to the runtime linking behavior.  

Prior versions of FreeTDS installed into /usr/local/freetds.  If you wish
to
preserve the old behavior, build 0.60 with your prefix set to the old
location.  Example: ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/freetds/

If you have a previous version of FreeTDS installed, and want to "get with
the
program" (use the new default locations), you will want to be sure that
the old
configuration files are preserved, and the old binaries are removed.  To
do
that, follow these steps:

1) move your configuration files to the new location. Example:
        cp /usr/local/freetds/etc/*.conf /usr/local/etc/

2) remove your old installation
        rm -fr /usr/local/freetds

3) if you have modified your /etc/ld.so.conf file to include 
/usr/local/freetds/lib, remove this and rerun "ldconfig"

4) if you have modified startup scripts for apache or similar applications

to include /usr/local/freetds/lib in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH, be sure to 
remove them now.

Once you have installed FreeTDS and taken these steps, your new
installation
should work at least as well as your old one.  You may wish to try out
"tsql" to
test things.  See "man tsql" (!) for details.  

Major changes
=============

Functionality
-------------

Microsoft SQL Server 2000 compatibility.  FreeTDS works with all versions
of
SQL Server from either Microsoft or Sybase.  Support for Microsoft's
servers is
now as good as for Sybase's, and works equally well with big- or
little-endian
architectures.  

Domain logins.  The ability to connect with domain logins to Microsoft's
server. Requires SSL library.  See User Guide for details.  

Speaking of datatypes, FreeTDS handles almost all datatypes, and can
convert
freely among them.  Conversions between integers, floating point, numeric,
and
character types has seen especially intensive work and testing.  The
datetime
datatype handling was completely rewritten to be freed from C's
difftime(3)
constraints, and is fully convertible with char/varchar datatypes. 
Conversion
failures will normally emit a message to the user-defined error handler.  

BCP has been completely rewritten and improved.  BCP from host memory
variables
works.  There is a new utility, freebcp, to replace the bcp utility
offered by
the vendors.  It should be mentioned that freebcp does what neither
vendor's
product does: communicate with both vendors' servers.  

The ODBC library has seen major improvements.  It continues to see a lot
of
attention from developers and users alike.  It is still not as mature as
the
db-lib and ct-lib implementations, but it is coming along and is quite
useful
in its current state.  

Locale support.  Well, just the beginning of better things to come, we
hope,
but FreeTDS allows you to specify your client character set, language, and
preferred date format.  

Logging.  Oh boy, you want logging?  See the User Guide for the gory
details,
but logging can now among other things tell you what configuration file
was
used to connect to your server.  

The iconv library can be used to convert Microsoft's UCS-2 Unicode data to
any
single-byte character set.  Work is planned to support multibyte character
sets
in the near future, possibly in the next release.  

Threadsafe operation is new and not widely employed, but is reported to
work. 
Many changes were made (e.g., gethostbyname_r) to support thread safety. 
You
are still subject to the constraints of the TDS protocol and the servers'
expectations, of course.  Not available by default; must be enabled with
configure.  

Support for the dmalloc debugging library was added.  This aided an
already
ongoing effort to fix buffer overflow and off-by-one errors.  Many error
conditions that used to cause a segment violation now result in error
messages
or log messages.   


Documentation
-------------

The User Guide reflects in full the capabilities of FreeTDS.  Many errors
have
been corrected, and many issues clarified.  There is a new appendix
describing
Unicode and how character sets affect FreeTDS.  

There are man pages for the applications, freebcp and tsql.  

[end release note]