FreeTDS Development Group

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

On Fri, 11 Jun 2004, "Thompson, Bill D (London)" <bill_d_thompson AT ml.com>
wrote:
> 
> source server name
> source user id
> source password
> source database
> source table name
> 
> target server name
> target user id
> target password
> target database
> target table name (may not be the same as source)
> 
> Apart from the fact that I don't like the idea of putting
> userid/passwords on the command line,
> I'm running out of meaningful flag letters...

Many ftp clients read ~/.netrc.  With mine (lukem ftp) it must be chmod
600 or it won't be honored.  That would handle mapping username+password
to hosts, and you could substitute servernames for hosts.  

No one says that's a secure solution.  It's definitely not.  But secure
solutions will require an order of magnitude more work, only to transmit
the password in plaintext.  

One set of flags might be:

-s source server name
-u source user id
-p source password
-d source database
-t source table name
 
-S target server name
-U target user id
-P target password
-D target database
-T target table name

I can't think of anything but T/t for "table", and suggest Z (zero) to
mean "truncate target table).  E (erase) might be as good, unless you're
going to support Explicit IDENTITY values, cf. bcp.exe.  

Another scheme suggests itself (so I don't have to?):

-S source_server:target_server
-U source_user:target_user
-P source_password:target_password
-D source_database:target_database
-T source_table:target_table

If the colon is missing, the value applies to both servers.  

You could also use ODBC-style connection strings.  But I wouldn't suggest
that; it's too much like ODBC.  

I would definitely not prompt for anything.  No one will use that feature.
 Command line options naturally supersede configuration file setting.  

HTH.

--jkl