Subject: Re: Roadmap for FE/BE protocol redesign
From: Christopher Browne <cbbrowne@cbbrowne.com>
Microsoft: I'm not laughing anymore.
References: <87r89ac6s4.fsf@stark.dyndns.tv>
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Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2003 12:07:30 -0500
Organization: Bell Sympatico
To: pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, gsstark@mit.edu (Greg Stark) wrote:
> So, just to throw out a wild idea: If you're talking about making large
> changes to the on-the-wire protocol. Have you considered using an existing
> database protocol? This would avoid having to reinvent the wheel every time
> postgres implements a new feature like prepared queries, bind arrays, or
> metadata information.
>
> There is a free implementation of the TDS (Tabular DataStream) protocol used
> by Sybase and MSSQL. I don't know how much of it would be interesting for
> postgres and how much is Sybase/MSSQL-specific.
>
> It would be pretty neat if postgres could use precisely the same on-the-wire
> protocol as other major databases, just requiring a separate high level driver
> to interpret the semantic meaning of the data.
>
> At the very least it sounds like interesting to do a compare and contrast as
> far as understanding what advantages the features TDS has have and what
> disadvantages, before postgres possibly misses good ideas or makes the same
> mistakes.

Let me take the liberty of pointing people to documentation to the TDS
protocol:
  <http://www.freetds.org/tds.html>

I agree that there are far worse ideas, when opening up the DB
protocol, than to look at some existing protocols, and TDS would seem
a reasonable one.  It doesn't look overly efficient, but it's not
overtly gratuitously inefficient...
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