[DB-SIG] remote Windows database access tool building

Vernon D. Cole vernondcole at gmail.com
Tue Mar 26 12:15:57 CET 2013


Dear group:

I am seeking your wisdom and advice.

Here is my situation:  I am working for a small company (eHealthAfrica.org)
who has taken a contract to build a software system to be used in
collecting and analyzing data relating to polio vaccination efforts in
northern Nigeria.  (This area contains the largest remaining pool of wild
polio virus in the world. I have always wanted to write software that could
change the world, and perhaps this is my chance.)  eHa prefers to do things
in django and Ubuntu, and I have been collecting the data on that platform
and building a PostgreSQL database. Now, the Center for Disease Control
wants the data on an SQL Server so that they can analyze it using their
existing tools.

By great good fortune, I just happen to be the guy who maintains the module
which can talk to both databases.

It is possible to run a django server on a Windows platform using
django-mssql, which uses an old fork of adodbapi internally.  I have signed
up to help upgrade that package, and the django leadership has made noises
that they would welcome the result into the realm of supported third-party
packages.  One sticky point is that they don't like the fact that adodbapi
runs only on Windows.  They really want to be able to get to SQL Server
from a Linux box, too.  There are two open-source tools to do that, but
neither one leaves potential users with a warm feeling.  Neither has the
universal connection capability that ADO offers.  I ventured to suggest
that a remote ADO proxy server might do the job.  The idea is to allow a
Python program running on Linux to communicate an ADO request to a Windows
box which would do the actual data access.  I think I know where, inside of
adodbapi, I can inject remote procedure calls (or something similar) to
make that happen.

1) Am I out of my mind?

2) I am leaning toward pyzmq (or something else) using 0MQ to talk between
the Windows proxy and the client.  Is this a good choice of tools? Is there
something better I should look at?

3) Will the result still be suitable for inclusion in pywin32, or should
this new version strike out as a new, independent fork?
--
Vernon
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