[Asterisk-Users] Microsoft SQL

[John Laur]

Isamar,

> I need to make a little IVR app and get/send the data
> into a MS-SQL database.
> As far as I know, it doesn't have driver for Linux.
> Anybody here already found here any workaround for this situation?
> Maybe, I can use an AGI interface to do that, maybe perl+ODBC?

There is no support in asterisk for talking to MS-SQL except for (maybe)
CDR with the cdr_sybase module posted here a week or so ago... For your
purpose, you'd probably have to use AGI, as the only internal DB stuff
asterisk can do inside of extensions.conf is to Postgres or its own
flat-file databases.

Although it's a bit OT for the asterisk list, you can talk to MS-SQL
from Linux using FreeTDS (http://www.freetds.org/). If you want to use
Perl, the best way to go is DBD::Sybase w/ FreeTDS. There is a Linux
library available from Sybase and some different DBD modules for perl,
but they have proven unreliable and/or problematic for me. I use FreeTDS
+ DBD::Sybase in production systems running millions of queries per day
and it is by far the best solution for accessing SQL server from Linux.
If you're going to use perl, there's no reason to muck about with an
extra translation layer in something like UnixODBC since the perl DBI is
abstracted sufficiently to allow you to switch DB's in the future
without much problem. Maybe if you were going to program something in C,
I'd say otherwise...

John