FreeTDS
Perl DBI and Microsoft SQL Server

Testing setup with tsql

Discover SQL server instances for server running on IP 10.10.6.6:

tsql -H 10.10.6.6 -L

TDS version

Selecting the correct TDS version can be the key to success in connecting to Microsoft SQL server.

For example with Microsoft SQL server version 10.50 and TDS version 7:

Error 20017 (severity 9):
    Unexpected EOF from the server
Error 20002 (severity 9):
    Adaptive Server connection failed
There was a problem connecting to the server

With TDS version 8 it connected just fine.

Date format

For further processing ISO dates are helpful and automatically provided by MySQL and PostgreSQL.

If you get dates in a format like "Feb 28 2007 12:00AM", you change the format in /etc/freetds/locales.conf like that:

[default]
    date format = %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S

Switch from ODBC with Microsoft driver to FreeTDS

In this case you might see the following warning:

Setting of CS_OPT_TEXTSIZE failed.

Reference: https://metacpan.org/pod/DBD::Sybase#Using-DBD::Sybase-with-MS-SQL