FreeTDS Development Group

[Daniel Fazekas <fdsubs AT t-online.hu>]

Great work on the new release, Freddy!
Reading about James retiring earlier this year made me feel all nostalgic. 
Eventually it grew into this strange curiosity to once again see what using 
FreeTDS and SQL Server are like these days, rather than just passively 
hanging around on the mailing list.

So I ended up installing a copy of SQL Server 2014 and keeping up to date 
with your changes the past couple of weeks. I've been playing around with 
them and testing many things, both on Mac and Linux, and I have to agree: 
FreeTDS feels ready for a new release.
It's very satisfying to store and retrieve emojis. 😃

The one repeating issue I kept running into is that, unfortunately, FreeTDS 
really is only the first part of the puzzle for even most developer end 
users. It's so easy to wrongly assume that problems start or end with FreeTDS 
when, in fact, the library was fine all along, and the problems are further 
up the chain. I can only hope a new release of FreeTDS will also spur the 
developers of dependent software to issue some long-overdue updates.

Sqsh is still stuck at no higher than TDS 7.1, or it would try and malloc 
(unsigned)-1 for any VARCHAR(MAX) column. TDS 7.3 won't actually be usable by 
anything interfacing with dblib or ctlib until they too add support for the 
SYBMSDATE / SYBMSTIME / SYBMSDATETIME2 / SYBMSDATETIMEOFFSET types. And PHP's 
pdo_odbc is in an especially sad state that makes it practically unfeasible. 
Rather disheartening to see bugs reported against it 7 years ago seeing no 
improvement still.

One thing that did work better with Microsoft's binary-only 2013 release of 
“Microsoft ODBC Driver 11 for SQL Server on Linux” is that it supports 
binding UTF-8 input parameters as SQL_C_CHAR which will then survive a trip 
to an NVARCHAR column server-side to be stored as UTF-16.
FreeTDS instead insists on immediately trying to iconv the UTF-8 to CP1252 
(my SQL Server's single-byte encoding).
I did note that this already seems to be on your TODO wishlist, and that even 
this could work through FreeTDS if only the clients used WCHARs instead.

> On Mar 23, 2015, at 19:55, Frediano Ziglio <freddy77 AT gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
>  although there is no dates planned nor any release
> candidate/beta/alpha/whatever my TODO list for the release is getting
> shorter! As somebody would have noted I mostly updated documentation
> to reflect changes.
> 
> The only big point left is SSL certificate check (there are no code at
> all although I'll have a look at curl implementation and there are
> explanation on how to test). I want this in the release as it is a no
> back compatible change so is better to have in a release.
> 
> Any help or test is really appreciated.
> 
> Frediano
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