FreeTDS Development Group

["Brian Bruns" <camber AT ais.org>]

> Hello!

Greetings.
 
> The lack of documentation in the lower-level routines is also a small
> problem for us. The source code and the doc/getting_started.txt text file
> got us on the road, and enabled us to connect, log in, do a query and close
> a connection to the database. But now is the time for all them questions
> start to pop up. Are we aiming "to low" and should we try the ctlib or dtlib
> instead?

Jim hit most of the points eloquently, so I'll just add my bit here.  The
libtds API is not fixed, it changes from release to release in small ways
as we extend our support of the protocol and improve compatibility with
the three APIs we do support.  We attempt not to do this of course, but
there are times that our hand is forced by a required feature.

That said, I am planning on having a libtds reference guide ready for the
next release (0.61), but I dont' anticipate a stable ABI for libtds until
FreeTDS 1.0  at some unknown time in the future.

If threading is important to you, ctlib is your library, otherwise I'd be
tempted to use dblib for it's simplicity and the maturity of our
implementation relative to ctlib. On the other hand, if you forsee
extending your support in the future to additional databases ODBC is an
attractive option, although you introduce a bit of overhead for the driver
manager, and our implementation, while improving, still requires some
work.  The primary advantage would be a single executable capable of
working against either database using FreeTDS's ODBC driver or MyODBC for
MySQL.  The other downside however is a dependance on the driver manager.

Good luck,

Brian