idiot database flamewars

[James Drabb]

On Mon, 2004-02-02 at 00:09, Chadley Wilson wrote:
> Hi Richard
> 
> Unfortunately I have no choice of using M$ SQL 2000-ent it is what
> already exist within our business, I am trying trying change our OS so
> that I can be a hero and save the company lots of money ;->
> Make no mistake if I can get our in house app to run on linux then our
> company would switch as many systems to fedora as possible. We could
> also offer the distro a bit of financial support once it has been proven
> to work.
> Just to clarify how the system works,
> The app is called Xalt you wont know of it because it is written for our
> company.
> It is installed simply by copying files from the mapped U drive to
> c:\swacc . straight forward with wine and it works. 
> Now for database connectivity you have to install client connectivity
> for windows (I have tried installing it in wine, but it doesn't work. I
> just don´t know what to do in this instance. If it will just connect to
> the database server the rest will be done by Xalt. Xalt is also 95%
> server based so the only thing the client PC handles is the running of
> the front end. 
> If some-one can just give me a starting point for database connectivity
> in linux I might be able to get some where.
> Problem is I have never setup a database before.
> So I have no clue. I have all the info on the server at hand (at least I
> think I do)
> 
> I have tried posting on the mysql, postgres & sql lists with no answers.
> My question is has anyone ever tried to connect a linux box to a windows
> sql server? With all the windows PCs in the world some-one some-where
> must have tried this.
> 
> Chad

You can use http://www.freetds.org/.  This lets you connect to MS SQL
Server with C, C++, Perl, PHP, Python and probably others.  There are
also a few good Java JDBC drivers to access MS SQL Server.  MS even puts
out their own Java JDBC for MS SQL Server.  Where I work all of our
critical data is in Oracle and some small departmental servers run MS
SQL Server, so I needed to connect to it as you do from Linux.

Do you have the source code to Xalt?  Are you able to modify it to make
a Linux client?  I am not sure you will be able to get Wine to work with
the DB.  If the front-end is so simple, you could easily write a PHP
based front-end and have it up in no time to access MS SQL Server over
the web.  If you need a GUI, you could write it in Python-GTK, C, C++ or
even Java.

It is very easy to access MS SQL Server from PHP
http://us3.php.net/manual/en/ref.mssql.php

If you could convert the GUI to web based, you could server the PHP app
from your Linux box with no problems.

Jim Drabb
-- 
---------------------------------------------------------
The box said: "Requires Windows 98/2000/NT/XP or better."
So, I installed LINUX!
---------------------------------------------------------
James Drabb JR
Senior Programmer Analyst
Davenport, FL USA