No Earthly reason for MARS

http://www.freetds.org/mars.html

A little explanation of what I see as the problems inherent in MARS and
why it's bad for TDS and FreeTDS, even if it's necessary to maintain an
ODBC driver compatible with Microsoft's.  I thought it would be better
to state my case plainly, where it can be evaluated and corrected, than
to make occasional snide comments as we slouch our way there.  Maybe
someone will even write a unit test to measure the "MARS tax".  

At microsoft.com, the TDS specification is [MS-TDS].pdf and the MARS
spec is [MC-SMP].pdf.  (Not sure what the "MC" means, nor why the
brackets are in the filename.)  The URL will surely change, but the
filename seems stable.  

--jkl