[DB-SIG] Getting schemas and other niceties

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Fabien COUTANT wrote:
>>How many middleware systems do we have?  Is it possible that we need a 
>>Database-API on top of/beside DB-API to start reducing all the 
>>duplication, or is there really no common set of functions?
> 
> I tried about a year ago to make things move on this subject: I suggested
> an API extension to obtain and represent schema information.
> With no luck.

Perhaps that's because people usually write application specific
database abstractions ?!

In real life, you only support n different database backends
(with n <= 3 in most cases). Writing an application abstraction
then boils down to writing a class with methods using DB-API calls
and one defining the SQL to be used for each backend.

That's not much work and easier to customize/understand/debug/etc
than trying to wrap your head around complex overgeneralized
object-relational database mapping interfaces.

"Practicality beats purity."

W/r to the subject line, I think the best workable approach that
the industry has come up with is the ODBC approach to schema
inspection. But that's really a DB-API extensions (which is only
needed by a few application types), so does not have a place
in the specification itself.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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