Thanks Tux for your detailed response on the drivers ! After reading your response I am regretting not having looked at FreeTDS. We have to open a bunch of separate connections for sub-queries and have had all sorts of issues and quirks on truncation, and not sure if the stupid ODBC driver is doing some strange padding, etc. Anyway, we are almost done with this work and too late to change driver, but I wish I would have asked here an opinion on DBI and SQLServer before engaging this project :-(