From kde-devel Sun Apr 11 20:58:52 1999 From: Bavo De Ridder Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 20:58:52 +0000 To: kde-devel Subject: Re: KDE DB X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-devel&m=92386619826155 On Sun, 11 Apr 1999, you wrote: >Bavo De Ridder wrote: > >> Hello, >> >> I am currently working on a KDE DB idl definition. As the name suggests it is >> based on OLE DB but I have adapted the OLE DB way of doing things to the >> Unix/Corba way of doing things. It is also based on the Property service. >> >> I will post the first version (very bare and a minimum, designing something like >> KDE DB is a very complex) in a few days. >> >> In the meantime: are there some developers who would want to get involved in >> this project? Is there already such a project? What about al those ODBC based >> projects? >> > >Bavo, > >Please have a look at http://orcane.net/freeodbc++ and get in contact with Manush >about the lib. Though he's in vacation right now i expect him to return these days. >A CORBA version of this lib is planned and making a wrapper from already existing >classes is much easier. The libodbc++ is intented to become _the_ ODBC C++ library >for KDE. There are still frictions with the driver manager and the drivers but we'll surely >roll out the stuff within the next month. I want ODBC to be fully integrated into KDE asap. > >You might like to subscribe the freeodbc mail list also (see http://users.ids.net/~bjepson/freeODBC/index.html) >and announce your plans there. I'll leave for a two week vacation on tuesday so i'll be >around for discussion of the topic first after my return. > I do wonder why people keep mixing OLE DB and ODBC. Although both technologies deal with databases and datasources, there approach is very different. I myself consider ODBC an old technologie. In the past years, data resided in one big database. Data outside this database was either duplicated into the database or not reachable at all. Nowadays, data is seperated in several, different databases. User information can be found in directory services (or my customer database is in LDAP). My sales are in a regular sql database and my correspondance is in a mailbox. How does ODBC deal with these different datasources? In the beginning, ODBC was only for sql databases. Off course, you can make a driver look like an sql driver although, in reality, it is a text file driver. This opens ODBC to these new datasources. But... ODBC wasn't made to do this. It is hard to implement a very simple address book driver for ODBC. What if you want to offer users a very lightweight driver, just the functionality needed for a text driver ? ODBC can't really solve these problems. What is OLE DB all about? Technically speaking: OLE DB is all about interfaces. A Session implementation implements a few required interfaces. Besides those, it can also implement some optional interfaces for extended or more complex functions. To use these extra functionality (querying for instance), you just query for the right interface. Can you build a text file ODBC driver, implementing only 7 functions, and no querying at all... Bavo De Ridder >Lars