[gnome-db]default provider

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

Hi!

I'm happy to announce that we've got now a GDA default provider
(gda-default-srv), which is being to be distributed along with the
libgda-client stuff, so that anybody can use libgda/gnome-db for
personal databases (ala MS Access, dBase, etc), that is, without
worrying about setting up a database server like MySQL, Postgres...

I've based it on sqlite because it seemed straightforward (in fact, it
took me just Sunday evening to do the provider), but, as there wasn't a
clear final decision about what to use, I've called it gda-default
(instead of gda-sqlite, for example), so that we can replace sqlite with
whatever we find necessary at a later time.

The provider is still missing some things (mainly schemas), but the
basic SQL stuff is working, and very well! That is, sqlite supports a
subset of SQL, with transactions, etc. The only limitation I've found so
far, is that, when you create a table, it ignores the data types you
specified for each field, that is, all fields are stored as strings.
But, as sqlite stores the CREATE TABLE sentences in a special table
(sqlite_master), I'm thinking about simulating data types in our
provider by looking at those CREATE TABLE commands. But, for the moment,
it just returns strings as the fields' contents

To try it, you'll need the CVS version, which has a couple of bugs, but
that you can run with little problems. Also, the "New DSN" wizard does
not work yet as expected, so to create a new DSN to connect to the
default server, you'll need to:
* go to the manager tab, and press the 'New DSN' button
* in the wizard, fill in the information it asks in the first page
* on the wizard's second page (which will show an error dialog), just
press 'Next' and then 'Finish' in the last page
* then, in the DSN list that is shown in the manager, select your newly
created data source, and edit it (there's a button on the small toolbar
to do so). In the dialog box that appears, just fill in the DSN field,
which should be empty. For sqlite, you only need to specify
"DIRECTORY=/my/database/directory".

And that's all :-)

When you connect to the new data source, gda-default-srv will create the
database (that is, the DIRECTORY you specified) if it does not exist
yet.

cheers

-- 
Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org> <rodrigo ximian com>
http://www.gnome-db.org/