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SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (Sybase ASE)

sqlspec.adapters.sybase provides first-class support for SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP ASE) 16.0+ via pymssql (>= 2.4.4) over FreeTDS TDS 5.0 wire protocol, featuring connection pooling (SybaseConfig), custom SQLGlot sybase dialect compilation, system catalog introspection, and Litestar, Events, and Google ADK session/memory store extensions.

Install and When to Choose

uv add "sqlspec[sybase]"
  • Choose SybaseConfig for transactional OLTP applications communicating with SAP ASE database instances.
  • Prebuilt pymssql wheels ship statically linked FreeTDS with native TDS 5.0 wire support across Linux, macOS, and Windows.
  • Note: Neither Apache Arrow ADBC nor GizmoData provides native ADBC drivers for SAP ASE, so SQLSpec communicates with ASE directly via FreeTDS TDS 5.0 DB-API connections.

Connection Setup and Protocol Negotiation

Sybase ASE requires TDS 5.0 protocol negotiation. FreeTDS negotiates TDS 5.0 either when an environment variable TDSVER=5.0 is set before process start, or when a FreeTDS server section alias is defined in freetds.conf:

export TDSVER=5.0

from sqlspec import SQLSpec
from sqlspec.adapters.sybase import SybaseConfig

spec = SQLSpec()
config = spec.add_config(
    SybaseConfig(
        connection_config={
            "server": "ase.example.internal",
            "port": 5000,
            "user": "sa",
            "password": "secret_password",
            "database": "app_db",
            "autocommit": True,
        }
    )
)

from sqlspec import SQLSpec
from sqlspec.adapters.sybase import SybaseConfig

spec = SQLSpec()
config = spec.add_config(
    SybaseConfig(
        connection_config={
            "server_alias": "SYBASE_PROD",
            "user": "sa",
            "password": "secret_password",
            "database": "app_db",
        }
    )
)

Key Configuration Parameters

Setting Location Description
server / host connection_config Database host name or IP address (default port 5000).
server_alias / freetds_server connection_config Section name in freetds.conf configured with tds version = 5.0.
database / db connection_config Target database catalog name.
user / username connection_config Authentication login principal.
password connection_config Authentication password credentials.
autocommit connection_config Defaults to True to allow DDL execution outside implicit transactions.
conn_properties connection_config Sybase session initialization commands (defaults to quoted identifier and ANSINULL options).
pool_recycle_seconds connection_config Maximum connection age in seconds before recycling (defaults to 24 hours).
health_check_interval connection_config Minimum idle time in seconds before running liveness probes.
json_serializer / json_deserializer driver_features Custom JSON text serialization/deserialization callables.

Dialect and Catalog Notes

  • Autocommit and DDL in Transactions: In Sybase ASE, statements like CREATE TABLE and CREATE INDEX raise error 2762 inside multi-statement transactions unless database option ddl in tran is enabled. SybaseConfig defaults autocommit=True and begins explicit transactions on demand via driver.begin().
  • Pagination: Supports both unparenthesized SELECT TOP n ... and ANSI SQL pagination ROWS LIMIT n OFFSET m.
  • System Catalogs: Reflection queries introspect dbo.sysobjects, dbo.syscolumns, dbo.sysindexes, dbo.sysreferences, and dbo.systypes.