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  • From: "James K. Lowden" <jklowden AT schemamania.org>
  • To: TDS Development Group <freetds AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [freetds] musing about "done"
  • Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2002 00:39:24 -0500

I updated TODO to reflect what I want to do with the documentation for the
next release. Other than that, I wonder what we want to do with FreeTDS.


When are we "done"? I've defined "done" previously as "everything the
vendors document", but I think that's too ambitious, and a moving target
besides.

Sybase defined a lot of functions that are pretty silly, from where I sit.
All the datatype manipulations, including cs_calc() and such, are very
Sybase-centric. I don't think they're widely used (else they'd be
implemented). Generally speaking, people move the data from the database
into local program variables, and run their computations with native
types.

Parts of db-lib are long in tooth. "Browse" mode never caught on, and was
superseded by SQL-92 cursors. Same with db-lib cursors: I never found
cursors of any kind, certainly not db-lib cursors, all that useful.

So I think "done" should be more modestly defined as:

* Everything needed by any free software project to replace Sybase's
libraries.
* The intersection of the vendors' API functions, except:
1. db-lib browse mode
2. db-lib cursors
* Full datatype support, except SYBSENSITIVITY and SYBBOUNDARY.
* What level of ODBC compliance?
* Encoding transparancy (UCS-2, UTF-8, ISO-8859-x).
* Protocol reference documentation.
* API reference documentation.

In short: enough ct-lib for Messrs. Gray and Peppler, enough ODBC for PHP
(?), and enough db-lib to move anything in and out of the server
comfortably.

I think the above list will tend to converge on functionality Sybase and
Microsoft share with other databases that is needed by most programmers.

Your comments solicited.

--jkl





  • [freetds] musing about "done", James K. Lowden, 12/17/2002

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