FreeTDS Development Group

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

On Sun, 4 Sep 2011 10:21:57 -0400
Ken Collins <ken AT metaskills.net> wrote:

Hi Ken, 

> Kudos to your hard work. Just observing things from the outside in,
> FreeTDS is a monument to awesomeness.

On behalf of everyone in AUTHORS, thanks.  

> In closing, I am going to put some notes up on my project's README to
> try and educate people about the old 8.0/9.0 and new 7.1/7.2 and why
> they need to worry about configuring and both setting things to 7.2.

I (re)discovered myself something I later read about the Unix guys'
experience with documentation: once they started including man pages
for the utilities and standard library, they sometimes decided to fix
behavior instead of documenting it.  

> I'll also try educating them that even tho we are using 7.1 does not
> mean we are not able to correctly work with the SQL Server 2005 data
> types. 

Because my database work uses numbers, not long strings, I didn't
follow the development of varchar(max) very carefully.  As we speak I'm
not perfectly sure how SQL Server 2005 sends a varchar(max) column to a
TDS 7.1 client.  Microsoft's MS-TDS protocol documentation says
datatype 0xA5, what we call XSYBVARBINARY, represents both VARCHAR(n)
and VARCHAR(max), and that for the latter the length is described by
PARTLEN, introduced in 7.2.   Because TDS 7.1 clients don't
recognize the PARTLEN type, the server has to send VARCHAR(max) columns
as something else, probably TEXT.  I can't test that right now, but you
can see for yourself with "bsqldb -v". 

> > These changes will require, are requiring, significant effort both
> > interesting and difficult.  To anyone reading this who wants to be a
> > part of it: please join.  There is much to do, and learn by doing.  
> 
> I think I'm already in (in my own way). 

Indeed, and your feedback has been helpful, as you know.  

Regards, 

--jkl