There's no doubt that pyodbc is the better-supported option; the pymssql module hasn't been updated in two years, and it relies on the Microsoft DB lib, which has been deprecated for a long, long time and is no longer supported, and may not even work with MSSQL 2008. Here's the deprecation notice from MSSQL 2000 docs, and I remember earlier warnings from MS way back in the MSSQL 7.0 days
(http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa936940.aspx). That said, pymssql does have some things going in its favor: it's simpler to set up on *nix OS's than an iODBC/FreeTDS setup, and it's arguably the best performing option for MSSQL. > appears to have poor support for non-ASCII streams. Pretty much, yeah. It is ignorant of the high-order bit on 8-bit characters and just passes it through, much like a C memcpy() might, but there is certainly no support at all for unicode: The MS-DBlib is essentially an MS riff of the old Sybase DBlib, which was floating around well before the first published Unicode standard in 1991. Anyway, back to the issue at hand - the original SQLalchemy MSSQL module was written against a pretty old version of pymssql (prior to .7.2) and that old version had pretty weak support for Binary columns. The SQLA MSSQL module dealt with that by monkeypatching a handler that replaces a Binary column with a String column, which is almost certainly the cause of the problem at hand here. It may be possible to fix that issue, but I'm not sure I want to invest any more effort into pymssql as it's clearly a dead duck moving forward. Should we? I'm not sure why we continue to see list users trying out pymssql - is there still interest in that path for a reason, or was it just the first hit on a Google search for python+mssql? Rick --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sqlalchemy" group. To post to this group, send email to sqlalchemy@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sqlalchemy?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
