Monday, August 31, 2015

SQL Relay 0.63 Release Announcement

Version 0.63 of SQL Relay, the powerful connection pool, load balancer, query router, and database proxy, is now available.

This release mainly focused on platform-compatibility, fixing failures to detect or build against various dependencies on modern versions of Fedora, Debian, Solaris, FreeBSD, and NetBSD.

A few bugs have been fixed as well, and there are a few changes.

Changes

The "oracle8" database type has been updated to just plain "oracle". So, in your sqlrelay.conf file, you should use dbase="oracle" rather than dbase="oracle8". "oracle8" is still supported, but the docs all say to use "oracle" now. Oracle 8i, 9i, 10g, 11g, and 12c have all come out since the driver was first written, and OCI hasn't undergone any massive rewrites in all of that time, so the name change definitely seems overdue.

Similarly, the "sybase" database type has been updated to "sap". SAP bought out Sybase a few years ago and ASE 16.0 is marketed as SAP ASE, not Sybase ASE. "sybase" still works, but the docs all say to use "sap" now.

There is also now an "id" parameter that can be set in the database connect string. If it's set, then if a client calls the identify() method or the sqlrcon_identify() function, it will return whatever value "id" is set to.

This is useful, for example, if an app requires that SQL Relay identify the database as "sybase" or "oracle8", as the name changes cause them to identify themselves as "sap" and "oracle" now, by default. It's also useful when connecting to an ODBC database. By default, SQL Relay identifies an ODBC database as "odbc", but it might be useful to the app to know what actual type of database is being accessed, rather than just "odbc". Similarly, FreeTDS connections can be id'ed as "sap", "sybase", "mssql", etc. rather than "freetds".

For example, with this configuration:

<instance id="mssqlexample" dbase="freetds" ... >
    ...
    <connections>
        <connection string="user=...;password=...;id=mssql;..." ...>
    </connections>
</instance>

In this code:

    ...
    sqlrconnection sqlrc("sqlrserver",9000,NULL,"...","...",0,1);
    ...
    identity=sqlrc.identify();
    ...

"identity" would be "mssql".

Bug Fixes

The default "maxitembuffersize" for Firebird is 32768 now, bumped up from 4096. Firebird has supported 32768-byte varchars for quite some time now. This should have been the default for all that time.

A few of the ADO.NET Data Provider classes implement the IDisposable pattern, but were missing destructors. The missing destructors have been added.

The setAuthTimeout() and setResponseTimeout() methods weren't properly exposed in the Ruby API. They are now.

And a few other things too... Full ChangeLog follows:

  • suppressed ruby configure warning
  • fixed glib detection if pkg-config isn't present
  • fixed mono detection on freebsd
  • fixed node.js yes/no misreport bug in configure script
  • added freetds tcl test
  • fixed slashes in tcl tests for windows
  • updated docs to mention firebird buffer size parameters
  • updated MAX_ITEM_BUFFER_SIZE to 32768 for firebird
  • fixed ruby detection on fedora 22
  • fixed missing export for setAuth/ResponseTimeout in ruby api
  • added manual include of inttypes.h in php api to work around issue with define/undef games, revealed on openbsd 5.7
  • tweaked ruby cflags script for debian 8
  • refactored mysql detection
  • tweaked unixodbc detection to also look in /usr/include/odbc
  • renamed "oracle8" connection plugin to "oracle"
  • renamed "sybase" connection plugin to "sap"
  • updated identity tests in api's/cmdline clients to use charstring::contains() rather than !charstring::compare()
  • implemented missing destructors for ADO.NET Data Provider
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