So FreeTDS is the glue between a linux systems and SQL Server, among other things. For my purposes I’m mainly using it to run Rails with a SQL Server backend. My understanding is that the alternatives to FreeTDS are Microsoft’s SQL Server ODBC Driver 1.0 for Linux or, if using JRuby, Microsoft’s JDBC Driver for SQL Server. But why am I even looking at alternatives? Well, FreeTDS has a performance problem when inserting large numbers of records. This bug may not be universal, which is to say it might only appear in certain contexts, but it is significant. Basically when bulk inserting records performance is abysmally slow. I’ve seen this within Rails which made me think maybe the problem was in TinyTDS or ActiveRecord SQL Server Adapter. However, I’ve noticed the problem with FreeTDS binaries tsq, bsqldb, and fisql. That makes me think the problem is in FreeTDS, at least the stable 0.91 release which was released in August 2011 though has been patched subsequently. It’s possible that the current 0.95 version will resolve these problems but I have not yet tested it. There is one binary not affected by this problem and it is freebcp. However, I have been finding that freebcp has it’s own bugs/quirks/idiosyncrasies or perhaps is exposing those from the underlying freetds code. In any case, freebcp is not a great solution, but for bulk data transfer from linux to SQL Server it seems to be the only game in town.