And I stand by my statement: DBD::Sybase makes output parameters appear to be part of a result set, but in fact they are handled differently by the SQL Server API

Actually that's not quite true.

DBD::Sybase simply uses the Client Library API, which in turn uses the TDS protocol. For TDS 4.2 and 5 OUTPUT parameters are returned as a normal result set (although it's a CS_PARAM_RESULT result set, instead of a CS_ROW_RESULT result set). I believe that MS changed things somewhat in TDS 7 and 8 (at least that's what I think I've read on the FreeTDS mailing list).

TDS 4.2 is the protocol level that was spoken by MS-SQL 4.2, which was originally Sybase SQL Server 4.2. TDS 5 is spoken by Sybase versions 10 and later. TDS 7 is MSSQL 7, TDS 8 is MSSQL 2K.

Michael