I have to write a program that connects to a remote microsoft sql server and gathers some information. I need this program to be executable on client machine. Just wondering what language etc people would think is most appropriate for this? (it will be run on windows machines only aswell) Easy set up on the client machine is also a consideration.

To be honest, most modern langs should be able to do that. What lang are you most comfortable with. Are you using Linux at all, you don't mention it?
If you mean you want a client prog that will run on MS & Linux clients, I'd go with Perl, as it runs fine on both and the code should be more or less identical.

I second the vote for Perl. Not only will it be portable, but IMO its perfect for processing db info.. CPAN gives you lots of convienent stuff for database processing.. for just about any DB known to man..

Yeah guys thanks for the ideas. I feel like a tard as for some reason mentally I had thrown scripting languages out the window just because I was thinking along the lines of executable binaries but perl is definately a great idea.

I have not programmed in Perl so here is a question for the Perl supporters out there. Would the clients need to install Perl for the client program to work, or is there a way to bundle Perl with the client program. For example in Python it is possible to create frozen binaries where the byte code and the virtual machine are bundled into a single package.

If they end up as separate packages (even if an installer can combine it into a single install operation) then I would suggest that the suggested approach would lead to at leat one client removing Perl from their system (because what do I ned that for) and then wondering why the program doesn't work!

graeme.

You do not need perl on the client machine in order to run the perl once it has been converted to an exe. perl2exe is a thirdparty program that will convert your perl scripts to an exe so may have more information for you but its home page states it creates stand alone perl executables.

http://www.indigostar.com/perl2exe.htm