RE: A few comments about SchemeQL

[Noel Welsh <noelw@dai.ed.ac.uk>]

Paul A. Steckler writes:
> How does DBI connect to databases; does it use ODBC?

No, there are separate modules for Oracle, Sybase, ODBC,
Comma separated values and a few other databases.

> If you want to use a driver with a non-ODBC interface, you would,
> as Francisco suggests, need to write a suitable unit.
> But nearly every database these days supports ODBC.

True, but not everyone wants to use a real database, or ODBC. For a
brief period of madness I was an 'Associate Consultant' in a big
boring company that did boring things that often involved
databases. The accepted wisdom at the time was to use the native
drivers as they were often a lot faster than the ODBC
drivers. Admittedly there was a lot of accepted wisdom that was none
too wise...

The point I'm trying to make is that SchemeQL shouldn't depend on
SrPersist, 'cause people will want to use different interfaces. For
example, there is a guy in my labs who's been sucked into the madness
that is Perl because it supports flat-text files in a simple[1] way -
there's no ODBC driver for text. SrPersist is the only interface for
now, but that may not be the case in the future.

cya,
Noel

[1] I use 'simple' in a weak way when discussing Perl
-- 
Noel Welsh
http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/~noelw/   noelw@dai.ed.ac.uk