[gnome-db]'i'd like to colaborate adding more providers'

[Steve Jorgensen <jorgens teleport com>]

I chose the best fit option here, but my message is not an exact fit.

I'm working with a team of MS Access refugees (see 
sourceforge.net/projects/ddpi) to achieve an approximate functional 
replacement for MS Access 97.  We don't necessarily care if we do this by 
making something basically new or by putting our efforts into an existing 
project moving in approximately the same direction, but with a focus on 
implementing the specific features and capabilities we want to have.

I'm sending this message to you because we may or may not want to join the 
GNOME-DB project, and we may or may not want to adopt libgda even if we 
don't, but the on-line documentation is insufficient to answer the 
questions we have about libgda.  If it's not too much trouble, I'd like to 
have you read the following list of our goals (as I, personally see them) 
to see if they seem to be compatible with the goals of GNOME-DB, and my 
questions about libgda and see if you can give me a clearer picture.

Thanks in advance.

Our goals:
1.  A database front end and interactive RAD environment.
2.  Must be fully functional on at least the Linux and MS Windows platforms 
(MS Windows is imperative).
3.  Powerful reporting on reasonable parity with MS Access (so far, nothing 
else comes close).
4.  Allows SQL queries of both ODBC data and at least one kind of shared 
file data (could be through ODBC driver).

libgda questions (not really worded as questions, but you get the idea):
>From the documentation, I cannot tell if it is possible to do SQL queries 
of data sources that support SQL (such as ODBC, PostgreSQL, etc.).  I see 
you are working on a unified XML query system for all data sources, but I 
hope this is taking into account that queries should translated, to the 
greatest degree possible, to back-end queries for optimal speed.  Our group 
would benefit greatly from a unified SQL query system as well, but I think 
we could live with handling that by using ODBC even if that means using 
ODBC where a specific libgda driver would be more efficient.  Would it be 
consistent with GNOME-DB philosophy to add a unified SQL query system in 
parallel with the XML system?

Thanks for your time,

	Steve Jorgensen - DDPI development team