Re: Proposed: Ghijk

[Charles Shannon Hendrix <shendrix escape widomaker com>]

In message <199802070517.AAA04204@rwf.lms.mit.edu>, "Sergey I. Panov" writes:

> Why ODBC? I personally have no experience with it, but my close
> friend, who is [high ranking/highly knowledgeable] Oracle consultant,
> made me think that vendor independent database solution of any type is
> a trap. 

No kidding, he's an _ORACLE_ consultant... :)

Seriously, this is dead-end thinking.  Oracle told him that, I'm sure.

> My understanding is that tables from one data base can not be
> transfered in to another DB in 100% of cases without loss.(He had an
> example when company tried to move its data from Sybase to Oracle via
> ODBC and almost failed with catastrofic results). Wouldn'y it be

Bah!  I do it all the time.  Unless I just because DatabaseGod(TM)
something is wrong here.

Three points:

* why did they use ODBC for this?
* they didn't write the conversion properly or it would have worked fine
* this has nothing to do with selecting a database mechanism for Gnome,
  it is a conversion issue best handled on a per case basis

I've done this before and the key point is maintaining referential
integrity.  That is the job of your conversion software and requires
extensive knowledge of the database being moved.  There is no magic
technology for this, just hard work.

Now, that doesn't mean that we cannot write code to aid in conversion,
just that it isn't an issue to be solved within Gnome.  An application
could easily handle this itself, and probably should, by having an
import/export function available.

> better to use CORBA in this project as well. In this case you would

CORBA would in no way garantee a good conversion, which seems to have
been your point.