Re: [boost] database library (was Report from Berlin C++ Standards Committee meeting)

From: Jeff Garland (jeff_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-04-14 20:48:20

On Fri, 14 Apr 2006 19:05:23 +0200, Maciej Sobczak wrote

> > What exactly are you planning on adding before the Boost 
> > submission?
> 
> At least one backend allowing to target what is traditionally 
> considered to be a Microsoft part of the world. ODBC backend would 
> be most generic, but we will of course also welcome contributions 
> that can talk to particular servers in their native way, which is 
> currently the case for all existing backends (jaw-dropping 
> performance gains were reported by our users after switching from 
> ODBC-related solutions to SOCI with Oracle).

As much as I agree ODBC would be nice, I think the fact that there are 4
bindings (pending reading the code) basically demonstrates that there is an
appropriate abstraction layer to allow different databases to plug in.

> > Error handling is the only thing that springs to mind looking at 
> > the docs
> 
> Yes, that's one of the things that can be more elaborated. Currently,
>  there's a single exception type (additionally specialized for 
> Oracle) for reporting all errors.

So this is where a critical question about goals needs to be answered. 
Presumably the goal is to allow portability across the operating system
dimension and NOT in the database dimension?  That is, if I write code to
target Oracle it will work on Windows, Linux, etc -- everywhere the db vendor
provides a driver.  However, there will be no guarantee that if I switch to
Sybase my code written for Oracle will still work.  For example, the errors
from Sybase might be different from Oracle.  Obviously if you use an ODBC
driver you would have the same errors no matter the backend data store. Is
this the vision?

> > I'd really like to encourage you'all to think about making a submission to 
> > the committee.
> 
> Thank you very much for this encouragement.
> As already said - we are looking for contributors with ODBC 
> competences. Before having the ODBC backend it will be difficult to 
> get wider acceptance than some of the competing libraries already have.

If we are going to get this in the standard we don't have time to wait for
widespread acceptence.  I think at a minimum we would need to get it to a
Boost review...

> > The only way 
> > to make it happen is to have a plan and get organized over the next few 
> > months to write up the proposal before the Oct meeting.  Even if you aren't 
> > able to come to Portland to present the proposal one of us that is there can 
> > help with that aspect.
> 
> Thanks again. :)

Well, I wouldn't thank me yet ;-) What I'm not so subtley trying to do is talk
you and everyone else that has an interest in seeing a standard way to access
database in C++ to cancel their weekend parties, stay up a couple hours later
a night, etc to pitch in an make this happen.  There's really only about 4
months left -- it's really a very short time...

Jeff