[DB-SIG] ctsybasemodule problem and dbi question

[Cameron Mellor]

From: M.-A. Lemburg <mal@lemburg.com>
>I'd suggest dumping the dbi date/time implementations and using
>the type from mxDateTime instead. They provide an easy to use
>C API and work great from inside Python.
>
>mxDateTime can be found here:


Been there, built that. :-) I'll take a look for my "play" project. The main
reason I can see for not using mxDateTime is that I couldn't rely on people
having it available. Now if there were a standard way for a package to
retrieve packages it depended on ... oh, wrong SIG ...

>I think dbi is not really needed anymore: The only two types I can
>think of where it has some use are date/time values (use mxDateTime
>for those) and RAW input values (don't know how important it is
>to be able to differentiate between plain strings and RAW input --
>plain Python strings work just fine for mxODBC in both modes).


I thought they were there as placeholders: that is, you knew from the data
that it was "special" and needed appropriate handling. Anyway, I'll take a
closer look and see what I can find. I may end up using ctsybase anyway
(since I'm playing with Sybase at the moment) and I don't really want it
dumping core. :-/

>Other things that are not defined in the DB API Spec's dbi are
>monetary types. Those might be useful too... as immutable C extension
>types with C API.


Hmmmm. Abitrary-precision numbers, with exact arithmetic. (Didn't Tim Peters
do a version of that recently?!) Might be an interesting way to learn the C
API; if I need them, I might actually have a go.

Thanks for the help: more news as (if) it happens,

Cam