[DB-SIG] Other extensions

[Art Protin]

Dear folks,
    I have lots more questions about ways that the API could and possibly
should be enriched.

A. Stored Procedures:
1.    The API provides a method for calling a stored procedure.  Has there
    been any discussion about how a user/application might discover the
    names of such store procedures?
2.   Has there been any discussion of how a user/application might create
    a stored procedure?
*   My implementation has made some attempt to address this.  All of our
    queries are "named" and "stored" but they are either stored with the
    session (connection) or with the user account (as provided in 
connect()).
    Everything stored with the session vanishes when the connection closes
    and everything stored with user account is visible by all connections
    using that account.  Thus I made visible objects of the class Server 
(via
    an attribute of connection objects), keep all the account info there and
    provided some methods on server objects to create persistent named
    queries and to control access to them by other accounts.  I have no
    method to destroy a persistent query yet.

B. Metadata
    Not all DBMSs provide SQL access to the system tables.  In fact, the
    DBMS I work with most is one that doesn't.
1. Has there been a discussion yet about how a user/application might do
    discovery of the table names?
2. and the column names with a table?
3. and the types of the columns?
*    My implementation has done naught to address this limitation.

C. Non-SQL Queries
1. Has there been any discussion of how a user/application should present
    queries that are in some other query language?
2. Has there been any discussion of the representation of query language
    names?
*    My implementation had to address this because our DBMS has its own
    preferred query language and management requires that I provide access
    to it (which I accept as perfectly reasonable).  To avoid confusion 
that might
    arise when trying to recognize the difference between it and SQL, I 
simply
    added extension methods like Cursor.exec_alt(prog, parm, keys) where
    prog is just the (non-SQL) program in a string, parm is just 
parameters for
    the query (just like for .execute()) and keys is a list of keys to 
use when
    parm is a dictionary (to linearize the parameters for handing off to 
the DBMS).
    But this does not address how a third party application might 
discover that
    an alternative language is available nor how it would know how to pass
    such a query from a sophisticated user to this alternative method.


    I doubt this is a complete list, but my mind has gotten empty while 
writing
this so I will send it as is.

    Thank you all,
    Art Protin