Re: Method for accessing SQL databases

[Seth Nickell <snickell gmail com>]

A general method for accessing databases from GnomeVFS is probably not
particularly useful. WinFS is *very* different from just being a way
to reference databases as a filesystem like structure. I'd suggest
just writing a method that directly solves your problem, on your DB
structure. libgnomedb would be a great library to use in writing such
a method, particularly if you want it to access multiple kinds of DB.

You might also find the code in storage/vfs useful. storage-method.c
implements a pretty simple DB-backed VFS method that allows both query
URIs, and reading the contents of files by their oid. I'm directly
using PostgreSQL (I *think* because I needed large object support, and
gnome-db didn't have it at that point, maybe it does now), but it'd be
pretty easy to convert to use gnome-db.

-Seth


On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 18:17:35 +0100, Magnus Bergman
<magnus bergman observer net> wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 16:53:24 +0100
> Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org> wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 2005-01-26 at 17:00 +0100, Magnus Bergman wrote:
> > > I'm about to write a Gnome-VFS module for accessing SQL databases
> > > (primary MySQL and Oracle).
> > >
> > if you use libgda (http://www.gnome-db.org) you'll get access to those
> > and more databases for free.
> 
> Yes, I know about it, and looking into it is already on my todo-list.
> But thanks anyway.
> 
> > >  And I was wondering if there is some kind of
> > > standard related to mapping a URL to an SQL query. And if I'm forced
> to
> > > hack something myself I would appreciate opinions from others.
> > >
> > I've many times thought about doing a database: method for VFS, but I
> > ended up not doing because it really makes no sense, to have a
> database
> > being accessed like a file system. The only thing I could come up to
> was
> > to have just database: be a special nautilus folder that would show
> all
> > database connections as folders, and when you visit them, show the
> > tables in those databases.
> >
> > But I guess it's better to have a nice program for accessing those
> > databases than doing it via the file system.
> >
> > Another idea would be to use an underlying database and offer it as a
> > file system, showing it like a file system in nautilus, not like
> > databases. Something like MS's WinFS. That would make sense, IMO, for
> > which you don't need that complicated URI scheme, you just need to be
> > able to access the files as any other file system, like
> > database://photo.jpg.
> >
> > What were your ideas?
> 
> What I need it for is to index text documents already stored in fields
> in databases (doing so in the first place was not my idea, I just have
> to deal with it). I have already written a Gnome-VFS plugin to the
> (commercial) search engine I use. And the search engine requires that
> each "document" can be identified with a single string, for example a
> URL. So I thought it would be nifty to use Gnome-VFS for this since it
> will also work with GStreamer, which I plan to use in the system later
> on.
> 
> Something like WinFS would suit me fine if it works with how the
> databases in question are designed. But how would the mapping from just
> a name to a specific field work? And should I interpret "database" as
> a suggestion for the name for of schema, or was just an example?
> _______________________________________________
> gnome-vfs-list mailing list
> gnome-vfs-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-vfs-list
> 
>