Re: OpenLDAP SQL Backend

[Tom Ivar Helbekkmo <tih@nhh.no>]

Greg Stein <gstein@lyra.org> writes:

> ODBC would probably be a reasonable place to start, but I'm not sure
> how many free SQL servers support it.

Worse, ODBC is basically flawed: it needs to be supported by the RDBMS
in question on each platform you want to access it from.  ODBC moves
the system dependent interface out to the client, instead of being a
standard network interface on the system running the DBMS.  I couldn't
believe my eyes when I first read this...

> I'm not sure what the SDK is like for MySQL, but as a database, it
> is one of the best free DBs out there (it does have some
> restrictions, though... most "free" SQL DBs seem to at this point).

Among other things, MySQL is not a multi-user RDBMS.  Lacking support
for transactions, it cannot be safe in a multi-writer environment.

> Postgres is free, of course, but I had some significant problems
> with that at one point -- the engine didn't support returning the
> number of rows affected in a delete or update ... icky.

I think you'd do well to look at it again.  Much is happening, and has
been happening with PostgreSQL, and the current versions (6.3.2 is
current, 6.4 is going into a feature freeze for beta testing within a
few days time) are very, very good.  There are also interfaces from
all sorts of things: ODBC driver for windows, libraries for C, C++,
Perl, Python and others, PL/TCL (that is, TCL with SQL extensions as a
stored procedure programming language) already present, and a PL/SQL
on the way.  Also among new features is the inclusion of 'ecpg', an
embedded SQL preprocessor for C.

-tih
-- 
Popularity is the hallmark of mediocrity.  --Niles Crane, "Frasier"