FreeTDS 1.6 release candidate 1

[freddy77]

Special thanks to Matt McNabb, Aaron M. Ucko and Craig A. Berry for their
many contributions to this release.

Many changes went in, the main ones are in BCP and CT-Library:

• BCP got many improvements in both capability and correctness: new types
  supported, better error reporting and better compatibility with the
  proprietary libraries. Some data that was silently accepted before (too
  long values, conversion errors) now gives a warning or error; better than
  potentially corrupting data.
• CT-Library error checking and reporting was improved quite a bit: more
  errors are caught, and they are more similar to the SAP library.
• Login and security: Extended Protection for Authentication (EPA), NTLM
  updates and strict encryption for Sybase/SAP ASE.

User visible (not in a particular order):

• Generic:
  • (*) Fix certificate check for hostnames with wildcards (OpenSSL);
  • (*) Use CORK flag correctly, do not delay partial packets (lower latency);
  • (*) Fix bound check converting float to unsigned integers;
  • (*) Avoid overflow converting numeric to string;
  • (*) Fix bulk copy in for Microsoft XML type;
  • (*) Improve support for TDS 5 (Sybase) bulk transfers (defaults,
    empty strings, text positions, row format errors);
  • (*) Fix ABI breakage for tdsdump_open under Windows, add
    tdsdump_wopen;
  • (*) Fix compatibility with Nettle 4 library;
  • (*) Prevent infinite loop when sending disconnect request;
  • Support Extended Protection for Authentication (EPA): channel binding
    for NTLM, Kerberos and SSPI, using tls-server-end-point for TLS 1.3;
  • NTLM improvements:
    • add MIC and key exchange;
    • send target name (SPN), required by MSSQL in strict mode with EPA;
    • support empty domain (user principal names, \user@domain);
    • use Unicode upper case for NTLMv2 user names (non-ASCII names);
    • allow longer passwords in multibyte client charsets.
  • Use instance name, not port, for Kerberos/SSPI SPN;
  • Disable TLS v1.1 by default;
  • Do not override all GnuTLS settings, add gnutls ciphers configuration
    to set the priority string;
  • Allow strict encryption for TDS 5.0 (Sybase SSL);
  • Support bulk copy into data rows locked tables for Sybase ASE;
  • Avoid some truncation on prepared statements and BCP insert;
  • Use proper collation for bulk inserts;
  • Add missing SQL collations;
  • Improve char to binary conversions (leading/trailing spaces,
    odd number of digits);
  • Report incomplete multibyte sequences with their own error
    (TDSEICONVPARTIAL, 2433) instead of 2401;
  • Report unavailable character set conversion at login;
  • Do not accept negative values for port, text size and timeouts;
  • Default to not flush the log file after each line (~3x faster logging),
    set TDSDUMP_FLUSH to restore old behaviour;
  • Option (TDS_DEBUG_CRT_FILENAME) to dump Windows CRT debug logging to
    a file;
  • Give error at configure time if iconv library is not found and not
    explicitly disabled;
  • Windows MSI installer in AppVeyor artifacts.
• ODBC:
  • (*) Accept any variable data type using DATA_AT_EXEC length;
  • (*) Fix inserting too much data with SQLPutData;
  • (*) Re-prepare a prepared query if it never returned a handle;
  • (*) Fix SQL_COPT_SS_OLDPWD attribute;
  • (*) Fix leak in SQLDriverConnect if string is invalid;
  • (*) Fix SQL_DESC_BIND_OFFSET_PTR handling;
  • (*) Update SQLGetInfo(SQL_DESCRIBE_PARAMETER);
  • (*) Make SQLSetDescField extend automatically the descriptor;
  • Add ServerCertificate and ConnectionTimeout connection attributes;
  • Load ApplicationIntent from odbc.ini;
  • Add SQL_COPT_SS_ATTACHDBFILENAME connection attribute;
  • Configurable date/time formats for conversions to character
    (DateTimeFmt, DateFmt, TimeFmt options and
    SQL_COPT_TDSODBC_DATETIME_FORMAT, ..._DATE_FORMAT, ..._TIME_FORMAT
    attributes);
  • Return row count correctly in presence of triggers;
  • Tell Driver Manager we support server side cursors;
  • More compatibility for SQL_ATTR_QUERY_TIMEOUT attribute;
  • BCP: set charset conversion based on binding type, add missing types,
    avoid crashes in bcp_bind with invalid terminators;
  • MARS: fix sliding window calculation, reuse MARS session until
    statement is freed.
• Applications:
  • (*) tsql: Avoid possible invalid type formatting a message;
  • freebcp:
    • Fix native file format (-n) used together with -E (issue freebcp native format doesn't work #647);
    • Support hexadecimal syntax for row/field terminators;
    • Implement -k (keep nulls) and allow multiple hints;
    • Dry-run option -j for bcp in;
    • Apply -L limit correctly;
    • Report rows failed to copy to server;
    • Better handling of exceptional cases in host files (prefix/terminator,
      oversized data, missing terminator message matching MS bcp);
    • Uninitialized columns default to NULL;
    • Faster bcp in/out using buffered file streams and optimized formatting;
    • Correct precision for variable precision date/time types.
  • defncopy:
    • Basic implementation of input mode (-i);
    • Support Sybase command line syntax (in/out);
    • Do not output USE statement, match Sybase delimiters;
    • Sanitize arguments.
• CT-Library:
  • (*) Remove leak freeing command;
  • (*) Fix ct_results() hang on empty result set with CS_DYNAMIC_CMD;
  • Support UNITEXT for CS_VERSION_150 and later (CS_UNITEXT_TYPE,
    CS_DATA_UNITEXT/CS_DATA_NOUNITEXT capabilities);
  • Copy binary data as is converting to CS_UNICHAR/CS_UNITEXT;
  • Implement setting date format using cs_dt_info, use same default
    date formats as Sybase library;
  • Many fixes and improvements to cs_convert (numeric, char to binary,
    length limits, error reporting);
  • Bulk copy:
    • implement blk_textxfer for copy in;
    • fix bulk copy into NVARCHAR columns;
    • handle CS_BLK_CANCEL in blk_done;
    • fix row count handling for blk_rowxfer_mult;
    • fix bulk copy out termination;
    • support all fixed types binding with CS_UNUSED length;
    • handle data too long and unsupported types like Sybase library;
    • do not ignore conversion errors;
    • separate error texts for BLK-Library.
  • ct_cursor: predict cursor type for CS_CURSOR_DECLARE, improve query
    parsing;
  • Better parameter checks for ct_cursor and ct_cmd_props(CS_CUR_STATUS);
  • Report long variable-width parameter values;
  • Allow sending a new command after CS_CANCEL_ALL;
  • Fail ct_results if rows are not fetched (instead of looping);
  • Do not wait for data in ct_fetch if none is expected;
  • Handle DONEPROC token ending a result set;
  • Report errors at the end of a result set (CS_CMD_FAIL);
  • Discard pending results when dropping a command.
• DB-library:
  • (*) Expand buffers to hold converted floating point;
  • Return table column name from dbtablecolinfo if available;
  • Truncate too long char and binary data for bulk copy in (SYBEBCOR);
  • Check for overflow converting data for BCP copy in;
  • BCP into computed columns again when allowing triggers;
  • Fix bcp_bind checks comparing with Sybase and MS;
  • Check parameters in bcp_getbatchsize;
  • Fix writing BCP error line to error file;
  • Fix result of dbstrbuild and other fixes to string formatting;
  • Use the message from libTDS to report libTDS errors;
  • Avoid possible overflows formatting dates;
  • Fix dbopts leak.
• pool:
  • Allow tdspool to be started by inetd/xinetd (-x);
  • Support systemd socket activation;
  • Exit on permanent accept errors;
  • Set no SIGPIPE on socket.

(*) Feature backported in stable 1.5 branch.

Implementation:

• Remove many warnings compiling with -Wconversion and static analyzers;
• Make implicit function declarations an error;
• Introduce and reuse TDS_MAX, TDS_MIN and TDS_CLAMP;
• Reduce usage of deprecated OpenSSL 3 functions;
• Move specific libTDS headers in include/freetds/tds directory;
• Move get_int_col from ODBC to libTDS, add tds_try_get_int_col;
• Allow sending blob data in chunks during bulk copy (libTDS);
• Split ODBC sources (info.c, catalog.c, odbc_util.c);
• Add and reuse xstrdup utility;
• Remove usage of WIN32, WIN64 and __WIN32__ macros;
• Remove obsolete CVS $Id, mkinstalldirs;
• Bump minimal CMake version to 3.10, greater use of GNUInstallDirs;
• CMake: allow building tests without running them, build wide tests
  consistently with Autoconf;
• Minor updates to RPM spec file;
• Unit tests:
  • central test setup and PWD file handling, TEST_MAIN() entry points;
  • more compatibility with Sybase/SAP libraries;
  • ODBC tests use ODBC 3 by default (was ODBC 2).
• Many OpenVMS build improvements (configure from trunk, ODBC with MARS
  and wide support, run full test suite);
• CI:
  • add MSSQL 2025, enable back MSSQL 2017;
  • build and run tests under macOS;
  • add Visual Studio 2026, remove Visual Studio 2010 and 2015;
  • use OpenSSL 3.3-3.6 if available;
  • run tests in parallel.

Caution

Do not use Source code links below, they are auto generated and broken.

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This discussion was created from the release FreeTDS 1.6 release candidate 1.

[freddy77]

As usual feel free to test and report issues.
I know that things like some row handling and count are not working correctly but that's is out of the scope at the moment.