Unfortunately, it is indeed a hack. You change several sql queries. This will affect either the results and/or the performance.
there is a lot more great code than hack in that patch.
I know, that MS-SQL was supported in earlier versions and that you decided to drop it.
We dropped it because we lacked a maintainer.
right. i was the old maintainer but didn't have time nor need for ongoing maintainence - perhaps you will volunteer to become the new maintainer.
If you can work more on it and preferably avoid changing any queries in core I suggest that you create a contrib project for this. We can then evaluate the popularity of this and then include it in the release after that.
i suspect that it will be hard to do this without changing queries. even in my version there were problems with the same 2 queries. it is OK to change queries as long the meaning is unchanged. ideally, we change to a more standards compliant query which is equally performing. it is OK to create new DB functions like db_query_range(). if thats not possible, we should switch on $db_type and issue differing queries for each. ideally, you would also support 5.0. In addition to a few schema changes, there needs to be a small install.mssql.inc i agree that this makes sense as a contrib project for now.