FreeTDS Development Group

["James K. Lowden" <jklowden AT freetds.org>]

On Mon, 11 Apr 2011 10:20:01 -0400
Ken Collins <ken AT metaskills.net> wrote:

> I happily found out that setting TDSHOST & TDSPORT from my ruby lib
> before establishing the connection worked quite well. So, is this the
> preferred solution?

Yes, for now.  The *preferred* solution is a small matter of
programming.  

If --with-tds-ver=7.0 (or higher) is used, IMO no freetds.conf should
be required, because:

1.  DNS can resolve a hostname to an ip address
2.  The form hostname\instancename can be used
3.  If no instance is mentioned in the servername, dynamic port
configuration can look for the MSSQLSERVER on port 1434.  
4.  If port 1434 doesn't answer, the normal default default port 1433
can be used.  
5.  Client-side encoding can be set by applications calling setlocale
(3).   

This arrangement would satisfy the vast majority of Microsoft SQL
Server users without using freetds.conf.  

But we're not there yet.  

--jkl