GNU Enterprise

[Reinhard Mueller <rmueller1 vanenburg com>]

Hi all,

GNU Enterprise is a meta-project aiming to build a complete free ERP system.
(If you are interested take a look at www.gnue.org)

As things really begin to start off now, we have made some thoughts about
how
to connect to the database, 'cause we want to be multi-db.

Looking at gnome-db, we found that there might be some common goals.

Our goals for the database communication library, which we call GEDI for
now, are:
a consistant interface to data
a single authentication system 
   you setup a gedi user and access control to data is handled by gedi
   so the backend database only needs a single user setup that gedi uses
with full access to the data
   this also lets us add access control to data that doesn't support it
(like csv files)
a clustering ability (for failover protection)
   (and performance reasons)
local caching of data from remote gedi servers
   (performance)
an internal sql parser (for non sql data sources)
abstract data access from sql (we call this row/column api)
(this list is totally unsorted regarding priority and urge)

We found that the most important thing, that is common api for all
databases, is already
fulfilled for gnome-db.
We would need python bindings (which is on your TODO list) and we would also
like
to have the thing you call "updateable recordsets", which I understand as
having data
access by just naming tables and fields, and not writing SQL statements for
SELECT,
UPDATE, INSERT and DELETE (which is also on your TODO list).
Maybe even one from us could take these parts?

But then, if we used gnome-db for GNUe, we would have to make all servers
and the
client library ** completely gnome-independent ** as we want to be
multi-platform as well.

There has also been discussed the possibility of taking the current gnome-db
code
and extending it to our needs without putting it back to gnome-db - but we
wouldn't like
that very much, 'cause it would be duplicating future efforts.

Please let me know what you think.

Thanks
--
Reinhard Müller
GNU Enterprise
http.//www.gnue.org
reinhard.mueller@bitsmart.com