Sybase defaults the TEXTSIZE attribute (aka LongReadLen) to 32k, but MS-SQL 7 doesn't seem to do that correctly, resulting in very large memory requests when querying tables with TEXT/IMAGE data columns. The work-around is to set TEXTSIZE to some decent value via $dbh->{LongReadLen} (if that works - I haven't had any confirmation that it does) or via $dbh->do(``set textsize <somesize>'');