[DB-SIG] Building Cross-Platform DB Apps: MetaDB.py

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Hi everybody,

this list has been quiet for some time -- looks like everybody
is happy with DB API 2.0 (except maybe for some more or less
esoteric features ;)...

I would like to take this chance to propose working on a new
project which should interest everybody planning to write
cross-database applications:

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MetaDB.py -- A Knowledge-Base for Database Work
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The idea is to gather information about various database backends,
such as MySQL, DB2, Solid, Informix, Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc.
and provide an easy to use API which allows to query that information
in abstracted ways.

E.g. one of the obstacles you often find when porting to a different
backend is that data types have different names and sometimes
even different features. It would be nice to have an API which
formats the column definition depending on some criteria which
I pass to the API, e.g.

	datatype_definition(metatype='string', maxlength=1024000)

which then returns the correct data types definition for the
backend I chose, e.g. "TEXT" for MySQL or "CLOB" for DB2.

Questions:
----------

* What do think about this idea ?

* Which requests would you have for such a knowledge-base like
  module ?

Thanks,
-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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