Re: Database for gnome

[Charles Shannon Hendrix <shendrix escape widomaker com>]

In message <19980206144506.62792@inch.com>, Peter Norton writes:

> Using DBI is absolutely the wrong approach for gnome.  The reason I say
> this is that DBI is currently only a layer on top of a particular vendor's
> CLI. 

Um... I don't think so.  I just built the Oracle DBD yesterday and it
seems to me it uses SQLnet.  I know that the C code needs to see the
Oracle client libraries on my development machine.

I'm curious enough to check in detail (I've used Perl DBI for a couple
of years now) but I know that quite a few of the sqlplus commands will
not work in Perl DBI with the DBD for Oracle.

> The second part of my reasoning is that if we support ODBC as the
> underlying mechanism, then perl's DBD::ODBC will be able to use these
> services, python's ODBC bindings will, as will any already written ODBC
> applications.  That's a mcuch bigger win, because it supports more choices
> and more easily. 

This is true.

> If we use DBI, then we'll have to write an entire ODBC interface for it
> anyway, and we'll be relying on the still un-finalized DBI/DBD interface. 

Why?  Doesn't it already have one?

My biggest problem with this is the overhead of Perl in the mix.
You would have to create a long-running server daemon for it to really
work well and that will eat lots of RAM and CPU.