FreeTDS Development Group

["ZIGLIO, Frediano, VF-IT" <Frediano.Ziglio AT vodafone.com>]

> 
> Dear all,
> 
> I am new to this mailing list and want to introduce myself 
> and our product / company.
> 
> My name is Sebastien FLAESCH and I am in charge of the 
> database interfaces at Four J's Development Tools.
> 
> Our product is a Informix 4gl compatible compiler / runtime system.
> 
> I wrote all database interfaces to:
>   - Oracle (OCI),
>   - DB2 UDB (CLI),
>   - SQL Server (ODBC and Native Client),
>   - PostgreSQL (libpq),
>   - MySQL (libmysqlclient),
>   - Sybase ASA (dblib*),
>   - ANTs (ODBC).
> 
> We have a large customer base using Informix and some of them 
> want to migrate to SQL Server, but keeping the apps on Unix.
> 
> We already had a look at DataDirect drivers - working quite 
> well by the way - but license is too expensive for our customers.
> 
> Now we started to look at FreeTDS...
> 
> Understand we do not just write a light driver to let 4gl 
> programmers do a few SELECT / INSERT / UPDATE / DELETE statements;
> We talk about a supporting a complex OLTP application 
> programming language (Informix 4gl).
> 
> We need a full support of ODBC (or any other API that gives 
> us the chance to do what we want), with advanced features 
> such as array-fetch, 
> stored-procedure support (in/out params), blobs, etc.
> 

Great !!!

> To be honest I am a bit scared about the status of the 
> FreeTDS project:
> 
> - Version is still alpha/beta (0.64) - when you compile 
> FreeTDS you get a debug version by default.

Don't mind for alpha/beta, is that nobody change it :)
About default configure by default use "-O2 -g" which include debug
informations. If you refer to the ability to always enable logging we
think that this is not a problem.

> - No scrollable cursors??? (this is very old stuff - now?)

Are supported by CVS. Currently we are next to a release (we hope).

> - There is no official support for SQL Server 2005 / 2008 
> (only TDS 8.0)
> 

No, there is some code in CVS and some work on it but not complete
(varchar(max) and other stuff not supported). 

> PLEASE: What are the plans?
> 
> You guys probably know about SQL Server's Native Client that 
> ships with SQL Server 9 (2005).
> This one is supposed to replace the old ODBC driver one day, 
> from my understanding.

No, MS will not support oldl ODBC driver but Native Client provide a new
ODBC driver. The problem was that OLEDB, ODBC and dblib libraries didn't
share so much code so a bug fixed for ODBC had to be ported to OLEDB and
dblib. Native Client is a new library implementation where all libraries
share the same code.

> Are they still using TDS with this Native Client? => Is TDS 
> going to die?
> 

Native Client is a new client library but the protocol is still TDS,
extended but still TDS, and I don't think nobody is complaining about
the protocol...

> Sorry to be direct but we need to be sure because if we 
> suggest FreeTDS to our customers, it's for a while.
> 

I think that features you require are at 95%. There has been other
company that help our project to get their 100% needs. For instance now
we support Orable binding cause someone support us with testing as we
don't have a Oracle installation.

> 
> Thanks,
> Sebastien FLAESCH
> www.4js.com

Regards
  Frediano Ziglio