Re: Connecting website with SQL-database.....

At 09:02 PM 21-04-2000 -0200, Manuel Lemos wrote:
>It's a trade-off.  If you want to take the most of a database non-standard
>extensions, don't use database abstraction packages at all.  If you want
>flexibility in such way that your applications will be more portable,
>database abstraction packages are the way to go.

Yep. But can enough useful stuff be abstracted to be common amongst most
databases? 

>>Plus some people seem to want Postsgresql to do transactions Oracle style,
>>whereas some might want Oracle to do transactions Postgresql style. So how
>>about Metabase helping out?
>Like other database abstraction packages Metabase only provides 3 functions
>to handle transactions:  AutoCommit(On/Off), Commit and Rollback.
>AutoCommit(Off) implicitly starts a new transaction.  AutoCommit(On)
>implicitly ends an ongoing transaction commiting any work done. Commit

But with Oracle if you do a create table an implicit commit occurs. That's
not true for Postgresql.

Plus if you get a warning/error, Postgresql _requires_ you to rollback,
whereas many other databases don't.

Quite a number of people on this list, including me have found these
differences to be significant.

>Currently there is support for MySQL, mSQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle using OCI. The
>MS SQL server driver is almost ready.  There is somebody working on
>Informix driver and possibly Sybase ASE. We could already move seeminglessly
>between applications.

Cool, someone I know has been looking for Oracle support for PHP. Not sure
why he didn't find it earlier. 

>Despite of that, the lack of such a complete database abstraction package
>for PHP is attracting many developers and some are willing to contribute
>with new drivers.

Yep, I found it quite surprising and annoying that I had to recompile php
(version 3) when I wanted to add support for various stuff, and that's not
just for database stuff. 

I haven't been keeping up with the php scene much tho - still using perl.
Perl is respectably fast compared to C++. For example string concats
weren't much slower compared to C++. But it's about 13 times slower for
floating point stuff. That's not a big problem for most of my apps tho ;).

All the best with your venture!

Cheerio,

Link.