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  • From: "James K. Lowden" <jklowden AT freetds.org>
  • To: FreeTDS Development Group <freetds AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [freetds] freetds reliability in a production environment?
  • Date: Wed, 7 Jun 2006 20:33:53 -0400

> what is the common wisdom on freetds's reliability in a production
> environment?

I don't know if anyone is qualified to summarize the "common wisdom".
I'll give you one man's opinion. ;-)

I know FreeTDS users number in the thousands, probably tens of thousands.
I personally know of two large corporations that use it for production
work, and I'm sure there are others.

That is not to say you should just drop it in, cross your fingers, and
press "go". Test everything carefully, and expect something to not work
correctly. Things do go wrong. Five years ago, they went wrong every
day. Now they go wrong infrequently, making it harder to notice the
errors. (We try to make errors noisy; the silent ones are deadly.)

> my team wants to write our new web applications in python on a
> debian-stable box, using the pymssql module, which uses freetds.

That's a very common setup. I'm sure you have hundreds of peers.

> are there any test results available?

Not except for running the unit tests. I'm not sure they'd tell you very
much about your ultimate use.

> are there any test suites available that we can run on our own servers
> that will stress-test freetds (ideally from a python front-end)?

The last time I benchmarked anything was a few years ago. I found that
FreeTDS was ~10% slower than the native db-lib driver from Sybase. We
fixed the most egregious offenders (in the datatype conversion functions)
and added code since, and, besides, YMMV depending on your needs. The
only real conclusion I would draw is that speed will be more a function of
your database (hardware, queries, indexes) than of anything in FreeTDS.

If you're moving gigabytes of image data per row -- pdf files or the like
-- in and out of the database, you may find FreeTDS doesn't do that
efficiently.

As far as "stress testing" goes, I've never heard of it breaking down
under load. It's just a library; it's a little hard for me to imagine
what kind of load would matter.

> thanks, and thank you to the developers for freetds.

I hope it's OK if on their behalf I say, You're welcome.

Regards,

--jkl




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