After many years developing FreeTDS, we've learned quite a bit about the protocol and how to write database libraries. Unfortunately, though, one of the things holding us back — and, obviously hampering the project — is the underlying utility library.

This wouldn't be a from-scratch effort; most of the code is already written. What's needed is a more uniform API that better reflects the TDS protocol, and that does not attempt character set conversions immediately on receipt of the data.

This would be a new client library modelled after stdio, a project to demonstrate what database programming should be like.

FreeTDS includes a little stub of a server, but it could be much more useful. One idea would be to make it a front-end to SQLite, thereby creating for the first time a TDS client & server pair composed entirely of free software.