Common Issues With EasySoft Driver

Swapping the FreeTDS odbc driver for the EasySoft driver with sqlserver 2008 caused fields typed as varchar(max) to be interpreted as binary. The EasySoft support response:

The problem is that your application is taking the large size of the field and assuming it is a BLOB type. FreeTDS is working because they do not support VARCHAR(MAX) to its limit - they only return a subset of the data. In your ODBC data source try adding/amending "VarMaxAsLong = Yes" to your odbc.ini file. If that does not work try: "DisguiseLong = Yes" and "LimitLong = size" - where size is a byte value of the maximum size of the field. Setting all three attributes as suggested in /etc/odbc.ini file made the problem did go away. The varchar(max) data displays correctly as text.