#title FreeTDS
#subtitle Perl DBI and Microsoft SQL Server
#author Stefan Hornburg (Racke)
#lang en
#sorttopics DBI; FreeTDS; ODBC; tsql

** Testing setup with tsql

Discover SQL server instances for server running on IP 10.10.6.6:

<example>
tsql -H 10.10.6.6 -L
</example>

** 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:

<example>
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
</example>

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 <code>/etc/freetds/locales.conf</code> like that:

<example>
[default]
    date format = %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S 
</example>

** Switch from ODBC with Microsoft driver to FreeTDS

In this case you might see the following warning:

<example>
Setting of CS_OPT_TEXTSIZE failed. 
</example>

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