[egenix-users] Problem with mxodbc 3.1 and Sybase 15.5

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Just to give our users an update:

We have been working with Dale to reproduce the problem he
was seeing with passing NULL values to the Sybase database,
but were not able to reproduce the exact same problem.

What we did find was that the Sybase ODBC driver for Linux x64
is broken in that it sends garbage to the database when
inserting a NULL value. This is most likely due to a 64-bit
related bug in the driver.

We were so far not able to find a work-around for this driver
bug. The driver simply ignores the ODBC setting for NULLs
on 64-bit platforms and copies over the data from an
uninitialized buffer.

On Linux x86 and Windows x86, the Sybase ODBC driver version
15.5.0.1022 (which is included in the EBFs 18373, 18374, 18375
and 18380 for Sybase ASE 15.5) works fine with NULLs.

Regards,
-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
> Hi Dale,
> 
> just to keep you updated: we've been trying several different
> work-arounds to resolve the problem, but none of them have been
> successful yet - the Sybase ODBC driver keeps returning error
> messages, or worse, inserts garbled data into the columns
> that are to receive a NULL value.
> 
> It may indeed be better to wait for Sybase to fix their driver
> instead of coming up with some work-around that may well cause
> problems with future versions of their driver.
> 
> Alternatively, please try one of the other available ODBC drivers
> for Sybase, e.g. the EasySoft one for Unix or the drivers from
> DataDirect or OpenLink. Even the FreeTDS ODBC driver could be used -
> it is not as robust as the other drivers and doesn't handle Unicode,
> but it's still worth a try.
> 
> In any case, we'll keep trying to find a work-around and hoping
> that one of the Sybase EBFs will eventually fix the problem.
> 
> Thanks,