FreeTDS Development Group

["Lowden, James K" <LowdenJK AT bernstein.com>]

> From: Knut Behrends [mailto:knb AT gfz-potsdam.de]
> Sent: May 14, 2003 10:47 AM
>
> we have a SUSE linux box that can connect to a solaris 11.5 ASE, exec
> SPs, run simple selects using isql and tsql.
> However there is a perl script with a $sth->prepare clause 
> that causes a segmentation fault.
> We had freetds 0.6 installed, and now we have installed 0.61 
> twice into
> the same directory $SYBASE/OCS dir using the account of unix 
> user sybase and into the /usr/lib using the root account.
> the freetds.conf file (or files, as there exist several of 
> them now) set the freetds version to 5.0.

Did installing 0.61 solve the segmentation fault problem?  If not, and you'd
like further help, please post your TDSDUMP log, taking care to remove
sensitive information such as passwords.  A backtrace might be useful, too.


> Would it be more helpful to download the sybase 11.0 ASE rpms, install
> the client on the linux box and that's it? (Instead of ironing out the
> library issues with the freetds installation)

If you're using Sybase only, and Sybase provides client libraries for your
client OS, then you don't need FreeTDS.  By definition, the perfect Sybase
client library comes from Sybase.  

If you can't run Sybase's software at both ends, you need FreeTDS.  Our
implementation suffices for many situations, but not all.  You can see from
doc/api_status.txt that there are many functions we don't implement, and
some we might never implement.  OTOH, we're open source, and you can usually
get the help you need here.  

> I'd prefer freetds but its developers also say in the release 
> notes that it might crash ASE 12.5 DB servers for unknown reasons.

For reasons we don't understand, connecting to Sybase 12.5 servers with TDS
4.2 will crash them.  That's what the warning is about.  Using TDS 5.0 is
perfectly safe.  

There is currently an effort to improve our ct-lib, which is what Perl uses,
and it is among our goals to support DBD::Sybase as a transparent
replacement for Sybase's libraries.  

Hope this helps you in your decision.

--jkl
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