The 255 char limitation is a protocol level limitation. You need to make sure that you connect to your MS-SQL server with TDS 8 (you set this in the freetds.conf file, IIRC).

Once that is done then you should be able to retrieve varchar columns wider than 255 (or at least there is no limit in DBD::Sybase that would prevent that.)

As an aside, LongReadLen has nothing to do with this - that's for BLOB-type columns (in Sybase/MS-SQL parlance that's TEXT and IMAGE data).

Michael

PS: keep in mind that I don't use FreeTDS, or MS-SQL at all, so the above is pretty much all I know about the matter...