FreeTDS Development Group

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

> From: freetds-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org
> [mailto:freetds-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org]On Behalf Of 
> Thompson, Bill D
> (London)
> Sent: June 2, 2004 12:05 PM
> 
> I'm just finishing up my reworking of the dblibrary bcp api, 
> retro-fitting
> the improvements to the processing that I put into the ct-lib 
> blk library.

Cool!  

Loading some files recently, we noticed that Microsoft's and Sybase's bcp 
libraries both trim trailing blanks from char & varchar character data.   You 
can stuff 16 characters into a char(8) if the last 8 characters are 
consistently blanks.  

I had fixed bcp.c to handle the varchar case some time back; I added char 
last week.    

> the -E flag (as supported by Microsoft's version) which allows you to
> control the behaviour with respect to identity columns.
...
> the handling of timestamp columns, as documented in 
> Microsoft's version

These will both be welcome, especially timestamp.  

> the "queryout" method, as supported by Microsoft's version, 
> which allows you
> to specify a query (or I guess the exec of a stored 
> procedure) as the source
> of a "bcp out" operation

Very nice.  (Yes, "exec <proc>" should work.)

> the specification of "stdout" or "stdin" as the output/input 
> file (that's an enhancement on both Sybase & MS's version)

Yay!  How did you work around the fseek() in "measuring" delimited character 
files?  

> before I submit my patch, is there anything else anyone is 
> desperate for ?

bcp_moretext()?  ;-)  Of course, it's the only missing bcp function.  I don't 
know what the protocol implications are; I don't know if this out-of-order 
data handling is only a db-lib feature, or if the server can somehow accept 
text data after the rest of the row data.  

Looking forward to you patch, Bill.  Thanks for working on this.  

--jkl

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