25 Nov 2000 camber   » (Journeyer)

Finally strung CAT5 to the basement and bought one of those linksys DSL routers (Yeah I know I could do it with a spare linux box, but I didn't really want a box on upstairs 24x7, and her office where the DSL line comes in is crowded already). The linksys is working pretty nicely.

I'm getting about 620kbps transfer rate off the supposedly 784k DSL line, but by the time you factor in IP overhead it's probably about right.

Released FreeTDS 0.51 this week. So far so good. Need to automagically find the 16 and 32 bit types for the platform it's built on. inttypes.h provides them on many platforms, but not all and where they are defined seems to vary a bit. glib using some sizeof macros to do it, so I'm probably going to follow that unless anyone has a better idea.

Also been working on a TDS based connection pool program. It works like this. Let's say you have a 10 CAL license for MS SQL Server and want to use Apache/PHP to pull data from the server. Now most likely you'll have many apache children (in a heavy traffic site anyway), more than the number of CALs you have. And more often than not they will not be querying the database at any particular time. So what to do? buck up for a 50 CAL license? pricey.

The TDS Connection Pool sits between the Database and the PHP (or whaterver) clients. It acts like a MS SQL Server, a client logs in and gets a forged login acknowledgement and thinks it connected. Meanwhile the pool maintains a group of logins to the real dataserver and when a client sends a query, it allocates a connection, forwards the query, forwards the response back to the client and then returns the connection to the pool. This has the additional advantage that the client-to-pool connection is very quick compared to the long connect time to the real dataserver, so you get the advantage of persistant connections without the disadvantages of having one connection per Apache child like PHP.

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