I can not confirm, only add to the rumour, as we have not upgraded to MSSQL 7.0 ourselves yet, but I believe I can shed some technical light on the issue. For MSSQL 7.0, deprecated DB-Library (analoguous to the Sybase CT-Library) and now recommends using any of OLE DB, ADO, ODBC, or RDO -- approximately in that order of preference -- instead. However, full backward compatibility with DB-Library and older clients is kept, meaning you will not need to recompile your old clients to work with 7.0.

From this we may infer that the wire protocol, called TDS, for the MSSQL 6.5 feature set has not changed. You can't use 7.0's new features through the old DB-Library, but you can still use the whole of the 6.5 feature set.

An interesting part of all this is that Microsoft now considers ODBC a "legacy" API. They recommend using OLE DB all the way now, or ADO (which is essentially a dual-interface COM wrapper around OLE DB) if you're in scripting land, or chained to Visual Basic, or you just don't like OLE DB all that much, or if you don't need speed. While OLE DB is not a particularly pleasant API, it is reasonable thin, and it does support a much larger variety of data sources, including directory services, message queing, and (iirc) mail. It currently has drivers for ODBC (bridge), Oracle, SQL Server, Microsoft Jet, and a driver for simple file-based persistent storage. It also supports remoting, so your program can speak through OLE DB with an OLE DB driver on a remote computer. I'm thinking OLE DB support would be a dandy thing to add to Zope's feature spec. -- Alexander Staubo http://www.mop.no/~alex/ "QED?" said Russell. "It's Latin," said Morgan. "It means, So there you bastard." --Robert Rankin, _Nostramadus Ate My Hamster_

-----Original Message----- From: Rob Page [mailto:rob.page@digicool.com] Sent: 27. juli 1999 00:28 To: 'bkc@murkworks.com' Cc: 'zope@zope.org' Subject: [Zope] RE: [Zope-dev] Zope and MS Sql Server? - MS has a free SQL 7 serv er implementation now er implementation now

...

I thought I'd seen somewhere that the Oracle or Informix DA could be used to talk to an MS SQL server. Is that true?

You can use the SybaseDA to talk to MS SQL Server 6.5

I don't think anyone has _confirmed_ but a decent rumor is that from 6.5 -> 7.0, M$ changed the wire protocol to the point that the sybase client libs will no longer connect.

--Rob

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