access to MSSQL?

[Dirk Koopman]

Roger Burton West wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 07, 2008 at 10:03:57AM +0100, Jonathan Stowe wrote:
> 
>>  a) use DBD::ODBC (with either the unixodbc or iOdbc libraries) with
>> the FreeTDS drivers.
>>
>>  b) use DBD::Sybase with either FreeTDS or Sybase libraries
>>
>>  c) use DBD::Proxy with a proxy service running on the Windows machine
>> to do the real connection.
>>
>>  d) for retrieval only, configure the XML SQL service on the Windows
>> server and do the queries over HTTP
> 
> IME the least painful of these was (b) with FreeTDS ((d) wasn't
> available at the time, but I can't believe anything XMLish is going to
> be pain-free).
> 

I did not find (b) very stable on large MSSQL databases and anything 
that is MSSQL specific was not available. I ended up using (a) as it has 
more MSSQL features available and seemed more stable.

However, I found FreeTDS to be very sensitive to things like character 
sets and large field sizes, this may have been the real cause of 
instability in (b) above. If memory serves, I had to patch it (for 
sizes) and I don't think that it was accepted into the main line. 
However that must be at least three years ago...