Tabular Data Stream
Tabular Data Stream (TDS) is an application layer protocol used to transfer data between a database server and a client. It was initially designed and developed by Sybase Inc. for their Sybase SQL Server relational database engine in 1984, and later by Microsoft in Microsoft SQL Server.
History[edit]
During the early development of Sybase SQL Server, the developers at Sybase perceived the lack of a commonly accepted application level protocol to transfer data between a database server and its client. In order to encourage the use of its products, Sybase promoted the use of a flexible pair of libraries, called netlib and db-lib, to implement standard SQL. A further library was included in order to implement "Bulk Copy" called blk. While netlib's job is to ferry data between the two computers through the underlying network protocol, db-lib provides an API to the client program, and communicates with the server via netlib. db-lib sends to the server a structured stream of bytes meant for tables of data, hence a Tabular Data Stream. blk provides, like db-lib, an API to the client programs and communicates with the server via netlib.
In 1990 Sybase entered into a technology-sharing agreement with Microsoft which resulted in Microsoft marketing its own SQL Server — Microsoft SQL Server — based on Sybase's code. Microsoft kept the db-lib API and added ODBC. (Microsoft has since added additional APIs.) At about the same time, Sybase introduced a more powerful successor to db-lib, called ct-lib, and called the pair Open Client. db-lib, though officially deprecated, remains in widespread[quantify] use.
The TDS protocol comes in several varieties, most of which had not been openly documented because they were regarded[by whom?] as proprietary technology. The exception was TDS 5.0, used exclusively by Sybase, for which documentation is available from Sybase.[1] This situation changed when Microsoft published the TDS specification in 2008,[2] as part of the Open Specification Promise.
The FreeTDS team has developed a free native-library implementation of the TDS protocol,[3] licensed under the LGPL license. WireShark has a protocol decoder for TDS.[4]
Oracle Corporation provides Oracle Net - software analogous to TDS.[5]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ "TDS 5.0 Functional Specification, Version 3.8" (PDF). Retrieved 2009-07-08.
- ^ "[MS-TDS]: Tabular Data Stream Protocol". Retrieved 2014-04-29.
- ^ Chip Andrews; David Litchfield; Bill Grindlay (2003). SQL server security. McGraw-Hill Professional. p. 260. ISBN 0-07-222515-7.
- ^ protocol/tds, Wireshark.org wiki
- ^
"SQL Server Integration Services with Oracle Database 10g". SQL Server Technical Article. Microsoft. May 2008. p. 2. Retrieved 2017-07-20.
Oracle Net is analogous to the SQL Server Tabular Data Stream (TDS) transport facility.
External links[edit]
- Microsoft Developer Network, Tabular Data Stream Protocol Specification
- What is TDS?, sybase.com
- FreeTDS
- TinyTDS, Ruby bindings to FreeTDS.
- jTDS, a pure-Java JDBC driver for TDS databases
- jBCP, an extension of jTDS to include BCP protocols
- United States Patent 7318075: Enhanced tabular data stream protocol, Microsoft
- Patent: TRANSPORTING TABLE VALUED PARAMETER OVER TABULAR DATA STREAM PROTOCOL, Microsoft
- Patent application: COMPRESSING NULL COLUMNS IN ROWS OF THE TABULAR DATA STREAM PROTOCOL, Microsoft
- WireShark wiki: Protocol tds