[DB-SIG] Experiences with DB-API2.0

[Magnus Lycka]

At 13:36 2002-06-21 -0700, Dustin Sallings wrote:
>java, perl,
>ruby, etc... each has a database API providing common access across
>multiple databases.

I'm curious: Can anyone share some experiences concerning
Perl::DBI, JDBC etc. Do they limit the programmer, so that
vendor specific SQL extensions can't be used?

Are they very complex?

Do they have a significant negative impact on performance
compared to native drivers?

I certainly think it would be good to have a uniform
way to speak to databases. And I would love to be able
to use it with Python. :-)

Might JDBC possibly be the way to go, if ODBC is such
a nightmare? It might be clever not to invent the wheel
once more.

At 20:32 2002-06-21 +0200, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
 > In reality you'll rarely have to switch database backends for
 > applications and if you do, you'll make sure that the effort
 > needed to do this will be minimal (or well-payed ;-).

But we might have the same application running at different
locations, for different customers, who don't want a different
RDBMS for every applications they have bought. Ok, today few will
buy anything else than MS SQL Server, Oracle or DB2, but they
might have Informix, Sybase etc since years back, and might
not want to change right now...

Also, In my consulting, I tend to emphasize the importance of vendor
independence. After all, I make a point of programming in a very
high level language which is very platform independent and also
free. Having the lowest possible cost in switching for instance
databases is a sales argument for me. I realize that there are a
number of other costs in such an effort--data conversion, DBA
training etc, but I still find it valuable to make the switch as
simple as possible from a programming point of view.

I recently worked for a large government agency that switched from
Oracle to DB2 half way into a project, since the licence fees differed
by a magnitude! This was a large system with tens of thousands of
users, and the amount of money saved here certainly paid for a lot of
programming efforts, but most customers are much smaller than this.


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