Monthly Archives: October 2011

Microsoft Announces SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux!

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Thanks to my, hopefully, open minded attitude, I sometimes let myself to dive into unknown with honest hope to find unexpected.

Today at lunchtime I let myself loose across Twitter archives and I came across an interesting account, or I rather should say: I fell into evil ways. It is @OpenAtMicrosoft. Hmm, another marketing specialist at Microsoft buzz’ing about the NKTOB ™, means new keyword on the block. Or, it is just Microsoft twitting daily menu from their newly opened cafeteria. But now, they presumably say what they mean:

source for info on Microsoft and interoperability, open source and open standards

Interoperability @ Microsoft

By the way, it is a foothold of Interoperability @ Microsoft. (For those who may have problems with interpreting the @ sign, like my grandfather for example, it means the same as English word “at” as in Kids at the House.)

In spite of that my eyes nearly dried out of the openness, I went for it and skimmed and voil?: Microsoft Announces SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux!. It will soon be widely available to customers. Yay!

Yes, you read that right

Brian Swan – MSFT

It’s an evil good news of the day and I’m keen in trying it out as soon as I polish the ODBC backend in SOCI. I hope to stop worrying about which one to use, unixODBC or iODBC, for SQL Server at least. Life may become easier for OGR SQL Server driver users too.

I also hope, Microsoft will consider to offer the fastest development environment for C/C++ programmers for Linux. Namely, Visual Studio.

Yes, I am radically open minded. I can take on the most incredible of challenges, even surfing an inflatable crocodile.

Update on SqlGeometry and POINT EMPTY in WKB

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Long time ago I discussed about how SqlGeometry handles POINT EMPTY in WKB format. The SqlGeometry states the definition of OGC GEOMETRY type for Microsoft SQL Server. Shortly, the message was that SqlGeometry implicitly casts POINT EMPTY to MULTIPOINT EMPTY geometry when generating WKB output. PostGIS casts as well, but does it in a consistent way, in my opinion, outputting GEOMETRYCOLLECTION.

Following those findings, I assumed it is not quite correct, or I didn’t like the inconsistency, and I had reported it to Microsoft Connect as a bug: SqlGeometry reports invalid type of WKB of POINT EMPTY.

Recently, I have received a couple of comments from Microsoft to my report. The comments are attached to the report linked above, but I paste them below for completeness and archive:

Our development team for the spatial data types tells me that it is not possible to use a single value for the WKB format of any spatial data type. For the POINT EMPTY, the WKB format does not allow empty points, so we are outputting a MULTIPOINT with zero elements.
In a MULTIPOINT EMPTY, we are stripping out empty points.

The reasoning is technically correct. It’s just Microsoft does it differently. However, as second comment suggests, the current behaviour may change in future:

But we might consider changing it to get consistent behavior.

SOCI 3.1.0 Released

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It has been a very long journey since version 3.0.0 of SOCI was released. Namely, it’s been nearly three years. The RERO philosophy didn’t quite kick in somehow, but the new SOCI 3.1.0 is finally out.

The latest package can be downloaded from here http://sourceforge.net/projects/soci/ and the complete documentation is part of the package as well as available on-line at http://soci.sourceforge.net/doc/index.html. The project web page reflects the latest changes as well http://soci.sourceforge.net/.

This new release brings all the developments that took place during the last two years and that were up to now somewhat inconveniently available only from our Git repository. At the same time it also defines the snapshot and a basis for subsequent library evolution.

Here extract from the CHANGES file

Version 3.1.0 differs from 3.0.0 in the following ways:

  • Added Ada language binding
  • Migrated build system from GNU Autotools and Visual Studio projects to CMake
  • CMake build tested with Visual Studio, GCC and clang
  • Incorporated a compromise for naming versioned shared libraries
  • Enhanced and improved integration with Boost libraries: Boost.DateTime, Boost.Fusion, Boost.Optional, Boost.Tuple
  • Bug fixes and improvements in core and backends:
    • Added soci::values::get_properties accessor useful for composing soci::type_conversion
    • Export advanced API of backend loader from DLL
    • Added static factory registration functions for backends
    • Added get_affected_rows operation
    • Fixed thread-safety of connection pool under Windows
    • Fixed bug with dropping const qualifiers when binding to std::vector<soci::indicator>
    • Fixed bug in default initialization of an object of const backend_factory which requires user-provided default constructor (see C++03/C++0x)
    • Fixes for 64-bit builds
    • Removed redundant exchange_traits breaking ODR on LP64
    • Better ODBC support
    • Type conversion support for unsigned integer types
    • Bug ID:1971436 – incorrect rowset copy operations
    • Bug ID:2010367 – memory leak (ODBC)
    • Bug ID:2010409 – invalid memory allocation in define by position (ODBC)
    • Bug ID:2021243 – long long type support in Visual C++
    • Patch ID:2483066 – 64bit Linux and 64bit integer submitted
    • Patch ID:2809809 – Fix build with GCC 4.4
    • Patch ID:2809810 – Fix SQLite3 build with GCC 4.3
    • Patch ID:2581206 – Windows Unicode application
    • Patch ID:3058275 – install target for CMake build submitted
    • Patch ID:3069375 – use $(prefix)/lib64 on AMD64 platforms
    • Improved performance while accessing query results (MySQL)
    • Bug fixes for PROCEDURE support (MySQL)
    • Removed throw statements from mysql_rowid_backend and mysql_blob_backend destructors (MySQL)
    • Verify that prepared statements survive session::reconnect() operation (MySQL)
    • Improved support for time and date (MySQL, PostgreSQL)
    • Fixed bug with strings of length exceeding 255 characters (ODBC)
    • Improved interpretation of the connect string (Oracle)
    • Added handling of unsigned long long (Oracle, SQLite3, PostgreSQL)
    • Fixes in integral types support (PostgreSQL)
    • Support for colon-casts (PostgreSQL)
    • Added possibility for use BLOB (PostgreSQL)
    • Added support for connection property “synchronous=on|off” (SQLite3)
    • Improved BLOB data handling (SQLite3)
    • Improved boolean type support (SQLite3)
    • Session timeout support (SQLite3)
    • Improved tests clean-up (SQLite3)
    • Added missing typedef of sqlite3_destructor_type which has been defined in sqlite3.h but since 3.3.10 (see comment for reference to SQLite ticket)
  • Updated tests for various backends and SQL data types
  • Changed naming conventions and style across all the source code
  • Firebird backend removed from official release as not actively maintained. Available in the Git repository
  • Migrated from CVS to Git repository

On behalf of SOCI Team, I’d like to thank all users and contributors who actively helped us to bring the new release to the public. I have tried hard to list everyone in the AUTHORS file. If anyone has been omitted, it happened by mistake and please don’t hesitate to tell me.

Unfortunately, due to lack of active maintenance the Firebird backend has been removed. Also, the ODBC backend needs more love, especially testing. However, we welcome anyone who is interested in taking over the maintenance of the Firebird backend as well as helping us to test and improve the ODBC backend.

As the author of the CMake configuration, I’m strongly interested in any feedback and constructive critique. Please, feel free to post your comments to soci-users. Do you have any ideas for SOCI backends to other databases? Share it!

We are very excited about this release. It allows us to define the directions for future work. There is plenty of ideas to pursue.