Nearly there connecting to ASA8 - but need final bit of help

Trying to connect to an ASA8 DB from an Ubuntu machine using FreeTDS.

After a bit of faffing around (and discovering that the FreeTDS heading 
is the DATABASE name, not the server name) I can connect with the isql 
commandline utility.

My files:

------- /etc/odbcinst.ini 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
[FreeTDS]
Description     = TDS driver (Sybase/MS SQL)
Driver          = /usr/lib/odbc/libtdsodbc.so
Setup           = /usr/lib/odbc/libtdsS.so
CPTimeout       =
CPReuse         =
UsageCount      = 2
------- /etc/odbc.ini 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
[bh2_m7003]
Driver          = FreeTDS
Servername      = bh2_m7003
Port            = 2638
TDS_version     = 4.2
------- /etc/freetds/freetds.conf 
--------------------------------------------------------------
[global]
         # TDS protocol version
;       tds version = 4.2

         # Whether to write a TDSDUMP file for diagnostic purposes
         # (setting this to /tmp is insecure on a multi-user system)
;       dump file = /tmp/freetds.log
;       debug flags = 0xffff

         # Command and connection timeouts
;       timeout = 10
;       connect timeout = 10

         # If you get out-of-memory errors, it may mean that your client
         # is trying to allocate a huge buffer for a TEXT field.
         # Try setting 'text size' to a more reasonable limit
         text size = 64512

[bh2_m7003]
host = 192.168.1.90
port = 2638
tds version = 4.2
textsize = 64512
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now when I do:
isql bh2_m7003 dba <password>

I get:

+---------------------------------------+
| Connected!                            |
|                                       |
| sql-statement                         |
| help [tablename]                      |
| quit                                  |
|                                       |
+---------------------------------------+
SQL>

Which is encouraging, but if I enter the SQL command "select 0", I get 
an error "SQLRowCount returns -1"

If I say "help" then I do get a list of tables
If I say "help <tablename>" then I get the table definition

Furthermore, in PHP, I'm doing this:

         $dbh = new 
PDO($dbConfig['db_dsn'],$dbConfig['db_user'],$dbConfig['db_password']);
         $sql="SELECT 0;";
         $x = $dbh->prepare($sql,array(PDO::ATTR_CURSOR => 
PDO::CURSOR_FWDONLY));
         $x->execute();
         if ($x->errorCode()==0) {
            while ($row = $x->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ORI_NEXT, 
PDO::FETCH_ASSOC)) {
                 echo "data=".$row[0];
             }
         }

And it connects, but is similarly unable to access the data

When I look at the DBServer console, the connection information suggests 
that I'm using CT-Library (which I believe is some Sybase-specific 
alternative to odbc) which is slightly unusual

I feel I'm nearly there, but that's not good enough!

Any ideas?