ntext 8000 char limit - still there?

Hello all,
   I'm using FreeTDS with Perl and I'm trying to insert large chunks of
text into a table with an NTEXT field.  My script runs and produces no
errors, but I'm only getting 8000 chars when I call
DATALENGTH(ntextfieldname) on the SQL side.  I found a discussion on this
back from 2004 in the FreeTDS list where it said this was a limitation of
the protocol.

Is this still a limit?  What is the accepted way of getting around this
limitation and inserting large-sized values into NTEXT fields?


My test code:
#!/usr/bin/perl

#CREATE TABLE testinsert (
#   querytext NTEXT
#);

use DBI;

my @srvopts;
push(@srvopts, "server=MyServer");
push(@srvopts, "database=MyDatabase");
my $srv_opts_joined=join(';', @srvopts);

my $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:Sybase:$srv_opts_joined", 'user', 'secret');

my $sth = $dbh->prepare("
    INSERT INTO testinsert
        (querytext)
    VALUES (?)
");

my @words;
open(WORDS, "/usr/share/dict/words");
while (<WORDS>) {
    push(@words, $_);
}

my $big = join('', @words);
print "L: ", length($big), "\n";
$sth->execute($big);

$sth->finish();
$dbh->disconnect();

#
# SELECT DATALENGTH(querytext) FROM testinsert;
#


-- 
Nem W Schlecht