I've written this page as I keep getting questions on how to access MS SQL Server from Unix. I have never had any reason talk to SQL Server from Unix myself, but since people kept asking me how to do it, I decided to compile an web page with the tiny fragments of information and I have. The main focus is in on Perl programming, but users of other languages should be able to find information here as well.
Beware that this page may not be updated with recent information. If you have any comments or corrections, please drop me a line on esquel@sommarskog.se.
Microsoft does not provide any ODBC libraries for Unix, but there are a couple third-party drivers out there. It appears that while you can find open-source driver managers, the drivers themselves are generally commercial products. Below is a list of ones that I have heard about. All seems to have free trials available. (Due credit goes to Reinaldo Kibel at Microsoft from whose newsgroup posting I have culled several of the links below.)
Some of these drivers appears to actually be bridges, that is they talk with a component on Windows, which in its turn talk to SQL Server, presumably through Microsoft's own ODBC drivers. This may be slower than a driver that talks directly to SQL Server.
In the list I have not considered the fact that Unix comes in many different flavours, and for binary distributions, you need a binary that fits your platform. You need to research this yourself.
See also Ken North's ODBC Portal at http://www.sqlsummit.com/ODBCVend.HTM.
When shopping a driver, make sure that it supports SQL 2005, so you can use all datatypes without restrictions. Even better, these days you should start looking for one that supports SQL 2008.
On the Perl side you would use DBD::ODBC, and, it appears, sometimes also DBD::Proxy. This FAQ page gives some example on how to this. For UnixODBC from Easysoft (see above), there is a Perl module available on CPAN, http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/R/RK/RKIES/UnixODBC-x.yy.tar.gz (where x.yy is the available version).
Personally, this is the approach I would recommend, as you would use something which is fully supported in all ends. (Unless you are using Java, in which case you probably should look in the next section.)
Ken North maintins a portal for JDBC as well. See http://www.sqlsummit.com/JDBCVend.htm.
Sybperl is the collective name for three different modules: DBD::Sybase, Sybase::CTlib and Sybase::DBlib. DBD::Sybase is a DBI driver using CT-Library, while the other two offers direct interfaces to the client library. As MSSQL::DBlib evolved from Sybase::DBlib, it would not be too much of a task to retarget MSSQL::Sqllib to use this library instead. It's not on my todo list, but see this page for some hints.
Note: I believe that with early versions of SQL7 there was some problems which prevented use of CT-Library with SQL Server. They were fixed in SP1 or SP2.
Microsoft has announced that SQL 2008 will be the last version of SQL Server to support connections from DB-Library. This is likely to mean the end for connections from all Sybase clients.
TDS -- Tabular Data Stream -- is the protocol that SQL Server talks with its clients. This is a proprietary protocol, owned by Microsoft (and Sybase, who have their version). Nevertheless there is exists FreeTDS which originally was a reverse-engineering effort of TDS. Now when Microsoft has published the TDS specification, they should be able to repair any cracks they may have. Check out the FreeTDS home page for further details. There appears to be a DBD::FreeTDS that goes along with it.
A correspondent told me this:
We have used DBD::Sybase and FreeTDS to connect to SQL Server for over 3 years. We've found that this combination gives excellent results if used carefully. We achieved 400 transactions per second on our old SQL 2000 system, and we recently switched to SQL 2005 without any application or driver changes.
Ken North has two more pages that can be of interest: .Net Providers (if you use the Mono project on Linux) and XQuery processors (if all you want to do is to run XQuery against SQL 2005.)
Last updated 08-06-26 22:57