FreeTDS Development Group

["David Fraser" <david AT abelon.com>]

Hi guys,

Not a bug, this time... an observation/suggestion...

I've been running with the FreeTDS ODBC driver beneath iODBC for a while.
Anyway, for a little experiment I tried removing the iODBC driver manager,
and got my ODBC app to link with the FreeTDS ODBC library (libtdsodbc)
pretty easily.

I know that doing this isn't to everybody's taste, but in certain scenarios
it might be useful. e.g. I have a customer who is concerned about the
memory footprint and whose embedded system will only ever talk to one 
database which currently happens to be MSDE. iODBC/unixODBC doesn't 
actually add much value, so stripping it out is possibly worthwhile. You might
argue, why use ODBC then if you are not going to use the Driver Manager -
well think of it as insurance/future-proofing - future systems might have more
memory and might talk to another database - so a Driver Manager can be
slotted back in if needed.

Well - as I said, it works for me, for my test app.

However, there are a few pretty easy steps to getting this to work on a clean
system, which would need incorporated into the source code/Makefile/configure 
script. (I'm assuming there aren't already options to run FreeTDS ODBC
standalone - correct me if I'm wrong, but I couldn't find them).

Is this of interest to the FreeTDS developers? Will I list the steps I needed 
to
take to get it going (and the issues) so that the changes can be taken on
board, or have I offended everyone's sensibilities by even suggesting such 
an outrageous idea which violates the very foundations of the ODBC 
architecture and threatens the moral fabric of our society? :-)

Cheers,

David
--
Consultant, Abelon Systems Ltd, UK
http://www.abelon.com