FreeTDS Development Group

[Frediano Ziglio <freddyz77 AT tin.it>]

Il giorno mer, 21/09/2005 alle 10.38 -0400, Lowden, James K ha scritto:
> > 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, 
> 

This is a longstanding issue. The problem is that mssql refuse to return
unicode to dblib and dblib have different defaults. The question is: is
there a way to connect saying "I'm odbc" and than say "I want dblib
settings"? If so we could connect trying to tell that we are odbc and
then change settings. SET ANSI_NULL does not suffice ?

freddy77