FreeTDS Development Group

["James K. Lowden" <jklowden AT schemamania.org>]

On Fri, 14 May 2004, Steve Kirkendall <skirkendall AT dsl-only.net> wrote:
> "James K. Lowden" <jklowden AT schemamania.org> wrote on Friday, May 14,
> 2004:
> > 
> > OK, first you send 0xA0, from which the client derives the number of
> > columns.  That looks fine, and, you're right, the information is not
> > repeated in the next packet.  
> 
> Got it!  There's a bug in src/server/server.c:tds_send_col_name()
> -- it's sending the NUL byte at the end of each column name.  On
> the receiving end, tds_process_col_name() reads a 1-byte length,
> and then the characters of the name itself but not the NUL.  Then,
> in the next loop iteration, it misinterprets the NUL character
> as a 0 length byte.  Consequently, it ends up thinking there are
> twice as many columns as there really are.

Excellent!  Chalk up one for the good guys.  

> But it *is* wrong.

I have to wonder how it ever worked.  

> I hope to get my altered versions of the server functions cleaned
> up and submitted this weekend.  That's kind of important, because
> my available time for this tiny server project has just about ended.

I guess "tiny" refers to the server?  ;-)

> > col     name                type      size    varies  
> > ------  ------------------  --------  ------  ------  
...
> > -   14       MINIMUM_SCALE  smallint           2       1  
> > -   15       MAXIMUM_SCALE  smallint           2       1  
> > -   16       SQL_DATA_TYPE  smallint           2       0  
> > -   17    SQL_DATETIME_SUB  smallint           2       1  
> > -   18      NUM_PREC_RADIX   int       4       1  
> > -   19  INTERVAL_PRECISION  smallint           2       1  
> > -   20        USERTYPE  smallint       2       1  
> 
> Do you know what SQL_DATETIME_SUB and INTERVAL_PRECISION
> should be?  I've had some trouble getting TIMESTAMP data types to
> display correctly, and they sound like they might be relevant.

I'm not sure how to answer those questions.  

http://www.schemamania.org/projects/freetds/build/sp_datatype_info.dump

That's the log of my query.  Tell me if you need more.  

This is quite a cool thing you're doing.  Some years ago, when OLE was
hot, I wrote an OleDB server: it offered library output as "tables" via
Microsoft's OleDB libraries and classes.  (Advise: don't bother.)  This
idea of yours is much more flexible.  In theory, there could be a server
framework that, with a few well-defined callbacks, could make any data
store acccessible via TDS.  Many possibilities fall out of that.  

--jkl