Would you care to elaborate on major drawbacks? I've used freetds quite successfully for both perl and ruby projects and have yet to run into any real issues (but then again maybe my problem domain is not very taxing). Also, rather than mucking with LD_LIBRARY_PATH, most *nix distributions use something like ldconfig to set where the loader finds it's libs. If being a sybase client is the core functionality of the box, I would use ldconfig before I started wrapping every client app in a LD_LIBRARY_PATH wrapper.