[DB-SIG] Other extensions

[Robert Brewer]

Michael Bayer wrote:
> On May 15, 2007, at 3:00 PM, Robert Brewer wrote:
> > It's not so much that making a standard interface is hard 
> (SQLAlchemy,
> > for example, and my Dejavu/Geniusql do this quite well). It's that  
> > such
> > interfaces are then called "Object-Relational Mappers" [1] and are
> > pretty universally shunned as an arena for standardization.
> 
> I would hate for the SQL construction facilities of SQLAlchemy,  
> Dejavu, SQLObject, or anything else like that to become  
> "standardized" (if thats what you meant).  to me thats the same as  
> picking the one true web framework.   both are too high-level to be  
> distilled into a single methodology.  There are some various ORM  
> "standards" out there and they are all equally useless/ludicrous.
> 
> standardization locks out all alternative approaches immediately, it  
> also locks down the selected approach from further development  
> without approval from a committee.  the additional levels of  
> bureaucracy inherent in any "standardization" stretches the  
> productivity of the typical OSS working model (read: non-paid  
> volunteers doing this in their free time, as opposed to prominent  
> industry-supported standards bodies like W3, ANSI, etc.) super-thin  
> and should only be used as absolutely necessary (which I 
> believe does  
> include very rudimental "agreements" such as WSGI and DBAPI).
> 
> DBAPI needs to remain as the most minimal layer of standardization  
> possible (and i think it should remain about SQL.  to support other  
> query languages would invariably require much richer APIs)...it just  
> would be nice to iron out the API variances in implementations a  
> little better...particularly things like dates, floats/Decimal, more  
> accurate method specifications (like explictly requiring the named  
> argument "size" when the spec says "fetchmany(size=x)"), expected  
> return results of execute()/executemany(), unicode.

Agreed 100%.


Robert Brewer
System Architect
Amor Ministries
fumanchu at amor.org