FreeTDS Development Group

[Frediano Ziglio <freddyz77 AT tin.it>]

Well... still in RC however I think it's the right time to decide future
directions. Some are just ideas...

1- release. 0.62 saw a lot of improvements in ODBC, ctlib and the
introduction of iconv library. However it took quite a year... I hope we
can produce next release quickly. I would like to introduce some tests
using higher language (PHP/Perl) this will help to write test code.
Naturally these test will be compiled/used only with a specific
role/script (like test-dist.sh). I know it's possible to compile a
separate PHP version in a directory however I don't know it this is
possible in Perl too (install a Perl module in a separate directory and
redirect module inclusion to this directory). Another (futuristic?)
feature would be a script to download and test automatically yesterday
snapshot and do all tests then send a mail (or call a web page) to the
maintainer to tell results just to say if a snapshot pass all test using
a given configuration.

2- bcp. I think that one of the most feature of 0.63 will be bcp
improvements. Bill has a patch to include bcp support in libTDS directly
and many changes are on the way.

3- cursors (another big feature). Cursors support is already in FreeTDS
(libTDS, CTLib). I think to extend support in ODBC too. This will
require a quite huge work (returning information, updating fetchs,
hidden fields and others...) but many users require it.

4- ODBC. It's not a secret I work mainly on ODBC :) I hope SQLNativeSql
will work even for Sybase in this release... Unicode (ODBC 3.5) can
wait... I discovered some days ago a machine with both iODBC and
unixODBC installed... It's possible and I'll update configuration tests
to detect odbc location in a better way. Also PHP seem to support many
more Driver Managers...

5- zero-copy. This will require a lot of change in convert.c and
related.

Less important change

1- multiple instance under mssql2k. Not that difficult but required by
many users. ODBC syntax for this feature will be
SERVER=real_server_name\\instance_name (like MS one).

2- tds version cache. FreeTDS should detect tds version and and use
appropriate one. This require connecting first with a 4.2 version and
than update version if required so it would be good to cache this
information (as MS drivers do). Naturally using "tds version = XX" in
configuration will disable autodetection.

3- net.c

4- NTLMv2. Not that complicated...

5- named pipes ??

freddy77