Scroll down on this page for more information on client drivers: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/sql-server-on-l...

De SQL Server Native Client on Windows supports many features [1], most of which are not supported with aforementioned non-windows SQL clients. JDBC & Linux ODBC support a few High Availability features (with try/catch). JSON, Ruby and Python seemingly support only basic connections.

What are the effects of this? Does anyone have experience migrating SQL Server clients away from Windows? Do Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL or others have database-clients with more rich feature sets? Or are these Native Client features barely used and not missed on non-Windows clients?

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms131456.aspx

Sadly not open source and no ability to use it with CentOS 6.

Support for RedHat 5, 6 and 7 so it'll work on CentOS 6 which is re-packaged, de-branded RHEL:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=364...

Can't really help you with the open source side of things.