FreeTDS Development Group

["Coleman, Dave" <DColeman AT US.TIAuto.com>]

Question for the group:

Does the TDS specification include any mechanism for providing packet
redundancy?  Obviously, the UDP protocol will not provide this.

We are experiencing some strange errors on our system, however; these errors
are intermittent in nature.
*       In the middle of some random batch (always the same script), we will
get the error, "Error converting NUMERIC to DECIMAL."
*       this same script (exact down to a strcmp()) will succeed
milliseconds later.
*       The severity level of the error is 25, indicating that it is an
internal SQL server failure, not code, driver or query related.
*       This raises an error on the client and everything that I can trace
to freeTDS seems to work just fine.
*       The error code is 3601, which I cannot find anywhere.

With regards to the fact that TDS uses UDP:
*       If I am utilizing only the tds layer of code, is there any
protection for corrupted/dropped network packets?
*       Is it possible to use a TCP socket for this?
*       Does the TDS protocol support the use of TCP?
*       Can TCP be used from a DSN'less linux client to communicate with a
MS SQL server running on Win2k?
*       I use my own "connect" function to allow non-persistant behaviour,
so I can modify the socket(), and connect() calls to make required changes
to the connection if need be.
*       Yes, I know our network should not be this noisy.  I am the
unfortunate slob who got asked to try and program a way around it.  I'm
leaning towards giving an answer of the "that would be nice, if it could be
done..." variety, but I'd like to know if anyone has run across anything
like this before.

Also, I am considering upgrading to 0.61 when released.

My one concern is simple:
        How much does the core tds API differ from 0.60 release 1?  If I've
been following the list and keeping up to speed with changes, I'm going to
have more than a few structure alignment issues when I re-compile, or am I
wrong in this assumption?  (Please tell me I'm wrong).

Thank you for your time,
Dave Coleman
Software Engineer
TI Automotive
Phone : (203) 427-2285
Fax :     (203) 427-4285
Email :   dcoleman AT us.tiauto.com