[DB-SIG] Getting schemas and other niceties

[Fabien COUTANT]

On Saturday, 19 July 2003, you (M.-A. Lemburg) wrote:
> mxODBC 2.0 is 100% DB-API compliant. If you read the spec carefully,
> you'll find that things like column sizes (which were really only
> useful in the days of mainfraime text based UIs) are optional.

Right, I overlooked this !  The description attribute enforces a structure
of 7-item sequences, but says nothing about type and meaning of the
elements (or should we consider element names enough for experts ? :-),
except for type_code.

> have trouble looking up the data in the MS docs. After all, we
> didn't want to reauthor the entire ODBC spec :-)

If we refer to an external spec, we might want to Pythonize it, or minimize
the set of mandatory attributes/methods to simplify driver writers job.
WRT meaning I'm ok for external references.

> >- ODBC, its API and your document are copyrighted material (respectively by
> I'm the editor of the DB API spec and don't have a problem with
> putting some of our docs in the public domain.

Glad to hear it.

> 
> >- SQL-level representation should be returned (such as the already declared
> >    type codes used in cursors description attribute) instead of byte
> No problem with that as long as we define name-based codes rather
> than hard-code the values into the spec.

Agreed.  I never intented to hard-code anything in the spec :)

> >- columns in result sets corresponding to features of standard SQL (column
> >    name, type, size, unique, nullable, ...) should be made first and
> I'd rather not change the layout of the result sets. Adding new
> columns is OK though (ODBC allows this too).

This is being debated in another post...

-- 
Hope this helps,
Fabien.