Re: Database for gnome

[Peter Norton <spacey inch com>]

Using DBI is absolutely the wrong approach for gnome.  The reason I say
this is that DBI is currently only a layer on top of a particular vendor's
CLI. True, ODBC is as well, but at least there is a precendent for ODBC
implementations to be useable over a network - the protocol doesn't care. 
I think that abstracting DBI into a network transparent database access
method w/ corba is asking for trouble.  Though I use perl a lot (and have
a few Klines of code relying on DBD::Oracle) I think that doing this would
mandate that the database be accessed through perl on the server side, and
I don't want that on any database I'm working on. 

The second part of my reasoning is that if we support ODBC as the
underlying mechanism, then perl's DBD::ODBC will be able to use these
services, python's ODBC bindings will, as will any already written ODBC
applications.  That's a mcuch bigger win, because it supports more choices
and more easily. 

If we use DBI, then we'll have to write an entire ODBC interface for it
anyway, and we'll be relying on the still un-finalized DBI/DBD interface. 

-Peter