Home | FAQ | Documentation | Links | License | Project Info | Download | News | Bugs | Forums

Joining jTDS

Although we haven't established a clear policy about accepting new members, the idea is that interested people usually submit patches and participate in discussions in the developers forum then when we are convinced that they are both interested in the project and able to help, they become full members. We do this because there have been a lot of people in the past that have become project members and then completely forgot about jTDS (at one point we had 16 members out of which there was only one constant contributor and another one dropping in from time to time).

If you don't have access to an SQL Server machine, that's fortunately no problem. ;o) What this means is that there is a free (reduced but working) version that you can download from Microsoft, the MSDE (Microsoft Data Engine) 2000. You can also get MSDE 2000 (which is a reduced version of SQL Server 2000) for testing purposes. MSDE only contains the (somewhat crippled) database engine and has no frontend or documentation. As a frontend you can use a JDBC-based tool (there are some Windows tools too, but I never tried one); I would recommend either SQuirreL SQL or iSQL-Viewer (both open source). The SQL Server Online Books pack (the same that comes with the full SQL Server) is also available for download on the Microsoft site, I would recommend you download it too (it's a .chm file, about 10 megs and has all the public documentation for SQL Server). Then, for more information (non-public this time, such as TDS protocol) check out the FreeTDS web site and, of course, jTDS (web site and repository contents). There are no URLs for the stuff on the Microsoft site because their links tend to change a lot, but you should be able to find everything using Google (usually the first result).

And another thing: for any questions you might have, use the forums (whichever you think suits your question better) so that anyone can answer your question and later people having the same question can get the answers without having to ask again.