[GLLUG] [OT]MS SQL Server

Matt Graham danceswithcrows@usa.net
Thu, 27 Jun 2002 10:21:51 -0400


On Thursday 27 June 2002 09:45, after a long battle with technology, 
Mike Szumlinski wrote:
> Anyone know how to get remote access to a MS SQL Server?  MySQL is
> beautiful because you can just telnet/ssh into the machine and run
> the program.  Is there a similar way to access MS SQL? Is there an X
> app out there that might do it?  Our server at work is MS SQL but we
> want to move from asp to php, and I need to be able to poke around
> remotely on the thing to know what the heck tables are called and
> what not.

Don't know of any X applications that do this, but there are a couple of 
Perl modules, freetds and DBD-Sybase, in combination with the standard 
DBI module, that appear to work just fine for remotely accessing an 
MS-SQL 6.5 server.  The downside is that you have to write your queries 
in a Perl script.  Kind of like so:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
$ENV{SYBASE}="/usr/local/freetds/"; # where the freetds module lives
use DBI;
use DBD::Sybase;

my $session=DBI->connect("dbi:Sybase:server=BORG","sa","PASSWORD")
or die "$DBI::errstr";

$session->do("use DATABASE");

$select="SELECT foo FROM blah WHERE baz=barf";
$cursor = $session->prepare($select);
$cursor->execute();
while($d = $cursor->fetch){
   print "@$d\n";
   }
$session->disconnect;

# hopefully that made sense

A slightly more interactive Perl thing could be kludged up reasonably 
easily, I think, but I don't have time to try and write it out right 
now.  HTH,


-- 
   We're standing there pounding a dead parrot on the counter, and the
   management response is to frantically swap in new counters to see if
   that fixes the problem.           --Peter Gutmann, ASR 6/18/1998
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see