Posted by Chung Leong on 04/06/06 05:33

davemateer@gmail.com wrote:
> Chung
>
> Many thanks for the reply.. I'm actually thinking of using IIS6 as a
> webserver. I'm interested why you stuck with Apache?

We use Win2K, so we only have IIS5. The decision to go with Apache was
made only a few months after the Code Red worm. There has never been
any issue so there was no reason to switch. Getting PHP to work on IIS
can also be tricky.

> The varchar 255 limit... any workarounds you know of?

As text columns don't suffer from the limitation, you can do a
"CAST(column1 AS text) AS column1" to retrieve columns wider than 255.
Sort of annoying but not a big deal.

I have heard that it's possible to compile FreeTDS for Win32. Haven't
tried it though. You can also try going through ODBC.

> Hmm, not sure I agree. One of the reasons I'm moving from Linux to a
> Windows environment is the TCO. This is a sub 1000 person company with
> only 1 linux webserver, and a 1 other IIS webserver. All other boxes
> Windows based (including the SQL server). So the cost of having to
> maintain expertise in Linux, and of disaster recovery is fairly high.

That's the same reason why we're sticking with Windows. Discussions
about migrating to Linux would end inevitably with the question "who
will back up the box?" By my estimate we've spent just over $50K in
software licensing fee on our servers. That's way cheaper than having a
Linux guy on staff.

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