Re: [gnome-db] New project

[Adam Tauno Williams <adam morrison-ind com>]

> >>What if I were to write a wrapper DBMS engine that handled SQL
> >>queries around data sources like CSV and XML files: things that don't
> >>have native DBMSs.
> >you can do it, as we've got, not fully completed, a LDAP provider, a
> >XML-based provider, etc

For LDAP using a DSML shim might be useful, with DSML you can query LDAP
with XML and result sets are XML.  There are several DSML tools on
freshmeat.

> Hm, sounds like an interesting idea, altho some sort of "sub-gda" would
> probably save a lot of work, like a meta-provider that "emulates" a DBMS and
> just calls plugins that take care of the file-i/o into XML files, CSV files
> or some other sort of interchange formats ( STEP anyone? ;) ). I don't know
> about the availability, but maybe a little peep into a CSV ODBC driver might
> help, i think unixODBC has one, don't shoot me if i'm wrong ;-)

It does, and it has a little SQL parser, etc... packages as a library. 
They call it "sqi" if I recall correctly, and it is packaged in such a
way that it can be used in other packages.  At one point in history (I
don't know if this is true any longer) KDE used it to read/write their
configuration files.

Doesn't the MDB GDA also offer something like this (as MDB files
themselves can't "offer" SQL support).

> hm, you might have a point there, altho i must admit at some points too many
> external dependencies might kill the purpose of the excercise. Anybodz that

Yes, and I think gnome-db already have lots of those. :)  As a user I'd
like to see everything stay in the C/*.so vein.

> > isn't there C APIs for that? (for CSV, since for XML we already have
> > libxml2).