FreeTDS Development Group

["Lowden, James K" <james.k.lowden AT alliancebernstein.com>]

> From: Thompson, Bill D (London)
> Sent: Friday, December 08, 2006 9:35 AM
> 
> The Sybase manual states (in different places) that either 7 or 8
> "bit" columns can be stored in a single byte in the database.
...
> The manual says:
> 
> "The status column in the syscolumns system table indicates the
> unique offset position for bit datatype columns"

Hmm.  This actually started with the systypes table.  I don't know what
status I was testing Chris's -1 rows returned on a Sybase server, and
freebcp broke!  It's been awhile since that happened.  

This is not caught by our unit test, either, by the way.  

I don't know what the "status" field is supposed to tell us, really.
Especially since it's not there, and not used:

1> sp_layout syscolumns
2> go
 ColumnName  Type                      Length      Nulls
 ----------- ------------------------- ----------- -----
 id          int                                 4   N
 number      smallint                            2   N
 colid       smallint                            2   N
 status      tinyint                             1   N
 type        tinyint                             1   N
 length      int                                 4   N
 offset      smallint                            2   N
 usertype    smallint                            2   N
 cdefault    int                                 4   N
 domain      int                                 4   N
 name        sysname                            30   N
 printfmt    varchar                           255   Y
 prec        tinyint                             1   Y
 scale       tinyint                             1   Y
 remote_type int                                 4   Y
 remote_name varchar                            30   Y
 xstatus     int                                 4   Y
 xtype       int                                 4   Y
 xdbid       int                                 4   Y
 accessrule  int                                 4   Y
 status2     int                                 4   Y

1> select name, xstatus, status2 from syscolumns where object_name(id)
in ('systypes', 'bittypes', 'jkltypes') and (xstatus is not NULL or
status2 is not NULL)
2> go
 name                           xstatus     status2
 ------------------------------ ----------- -----------

(0 rows affected)

Thanks for the advice anyway.  Please let me know if you find out
anything else.  

Somewhere I have an old 11.5 Sybase installation.  If I can boot that
machine, maybe tcpdump will lend a clue.  But I'd sure be glad if
someone else found out first.  The only thing I ever do with Sybase
servers these days is test against them.  

Regards, 

--jkl

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