topic Re: Sybase Client 10.0.4.0 Alpha in Operating System - OpenVMS

Sybase Client 10.0.4.0 Alpha

JerryK — Tue, 29 May 2007 09:54:52 GMT

Is there an Integrity Sysbase Client available? Is there anything else that is close? Has anyone tried translating the Alpha sybase client executable into an Integrity sybase client executable?

Re: Sybase Client 10.0.4.0 Alpha

Wim Van den Wyngaert — Tue, 29 May 2007 10:00:14 GMT

No.

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1024242

But report if you get it running after translation.

WIm

Re: Sybase Client 10.0.4.0 Alpha

Craig A Berry — Tue, 29 May 2007 13:00:10 GMT

We're now using FreeTDS instead of the old Sybase clients. Assuming you have a C compiler and either MMS or MMK, grab the stable release from here and give it a try:

http://www.freetds.org

We're still on Alpha, but I know of no reason FreeTDS wouldn't build on IA64. For our needs, we hacked together some command parsing wrappers so that we could continue to use the VMS-style isql and bcp commands, but if you just need the object libraries, you should be able to use those exactly as you currently use the Sybase versions.

Re: Sybase Client 10.0.4.0 Alpha

Wim Van den Wyngaert — Wed, 30 May 2007 02:04:08 GMT

Is this complete ?

ISQL ? BCP ? DEFNCOPY ? Language support ?

Compatible with Sybase API (the .h files etc) ? Or just a way to access the database (thus requiring a rewrite of the application) ?

Wim (confused)

Re: Sybase Client 10.0.4.0 Alpha

Ian Miller. — Wed, 30 May 2007 06:24:26 GMT

There is also a FreeTDS library at

http://starlet.deltatel.ru/~laishev/work/freetds/

Re: Sybase Client 10.0.4.0 Alpha

Craig A Berry — Wed, 30 May 2007 10:17:15 GMT

Wim, FreeTDS has ctlib and dblib, which are the documented APIs that have been part of Sybase for a long time. There is also an ODBC driver included (though building it is optional). So you have three APIs to choose from, if that's what you mean by "language support." BTW, headers are included for all of these APIs.

FreeTDS speaks all versions of the TDS (Tabular DataStream) protocol used by Sybase and Microsoft database servers. There are about three different ways (build option, configuration setting, environment setting) to control which version you get, all covered in the documentation.

As far as utilities go, it does have tsql and freebcp, which are pretty much drop-in replacements for the unix versions of isql and bcp, and it also has defncopy. Something we've done where I work but I haven't submitted patches for yet is VMS command wrappers around tsql and bcp so you can preserve existing command procedures (and user habits ;-)). In case that's not clear, I mean being able to say, for example

$ ISQL/SERVER_NAME=server/USER=user/PASS=pass

instead of

$ tsql -"Sserver" -"Uuser" -"Ppass"

So when you ask whether FreeTDS is complete, it is both more complete and less complete than the old Sybase clients. It has more different APIs and speaks to more different versions of database servers from both Microsoft and Sybase. So in that sense it's more complete. If your software makes calls to ctlib or dblib, then you're probably set.

But from the point of view of the client utilities (not the client libraries), FreeTDS is not quite a drop-in replacement for the Sybase clients, but is getting to be more so.

I think for any VMS Sybase users with client-only (not server) applications, FreeTDS is probably the most viable option for going to IA64.

Ian, Ruslan's port of FreeTDS is pretty out of date. He was the first to do it, but over the last few years my patches to incorporate VMS build support into the main source repository have all been accepted by the maintainers, so it's been there since about version 0.61 (current is 0.64, I think).

Re: Sybase Client 10.0.4.0 Alpha

JerryK — Thu, 31 May 2007 10:50:20 GMT

Thank you. We have some things to try.