FreeTDS Development Group

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

> From: Christos Zoulas
> Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2005 8:29 AM
> 
> | Unicode data in a Unicode-only collation or ntext data cannot be
> | sent to clients using DB-Library (such as ISQL) or ODBC version
> | 3.7 or earlier.
> 
> Maybe we should change our login packet to tell MSSQL that we
> support Unicode even with tds 7.0?

Hi Christos, 

Infeasible, I think.  

The message is sent if the login packet does not set the "I'm an ODBC
driver" bit in the options field.  Setting it on (as we used to) breaks
db-lib semantics.  So the behavior is "right" for programs that expect,
say, NOT NULL to be the default nullability of a column in a CREATE
TABLE statement.  

(tsql doesn't declare itself to be an ODBC driver, either.  I don't
regard that as a problem.)

If we wanted to, we could add something like "ODBC semantics" to
freetds.conf, or even set each element explicitly.  Down that road lies
Sybase-style options and capabilities.  I don't know if we want to go
there.  

I don't know if Sybase supports UTF-8 clients for db-lib.  It would
require bending the rules somewhat, because db-lib defines many buffers
as holding ASCII data.  

Regards, 

--jkl

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