About the only reason I ever boot into Windows on the spare PC nowadays is because I need to use Enterprise Manager or Query Analyser to manage a SQL Server database. Today it was inconvenient to reboot, because I was in the middle of doing a lot of printing. So I googled “Linux SQL Server client” and came across sqsh. Installation and set up sounded a wee bit complicated (required compiling from source), but doable, so I put it on … the back burner, with a reminder to myself to do it sometime over the next week or so.
Then later on I happened to be sitting at the Mepis PC, so I pulled up Synaptic and typed sqsh into the search field. Hey presto! Two clicks and it was installed. “Still,” I thought, “I’m bound to have to fiddle about configuring it.”
Undeterred, I typed
sqsh -Umyusername -Pmypassword -Smyservername
at the shell prompt, and a sqsh prompt appeared. If Linux doesn’t give you an error message then nothing has gone wrong. So:
use mydatabasename
go
Still no error!
SELECT * FROM mylittletable
and there were the results! Fantastic — if possibly not all that secure when used remotely 
Highly recommended if you need occasional access to a SQL Server or Sybase database from Linux.