[Q] How suitable is Squeak for Database work

Avi Bryant avi at beta4.com
Sat Jan 4 02:51:00 UTC 2003


On 4 Jan 2003, Cees de Groot wrote:

> Avi Bryant <avi at beta4.com> said:
> >As far as I'm concerned, yes, though perl folks may well disagree.  But
> >ODBC is only really a viable solution on Windows - I'd rather something
> >a little more portable, probably wrapping the existing socket-based MySQL
> >and PostgreSQL drivers to start.
> >
> Having spent a number of years writing ODBC drivers for Unix, Linux,
> MacOS and VMS (and of course Win16/32), I have to disagree about the
> portability bit (ODBC started out as the X/Open SQL Access Group Call
> Level Interface before being embraced-and-extended by Micrsoft) ;-)
>
> An ex-colleague of mine still maintains the iODBC stuff (or whatever
> it's called) for Unix, which works fine and might be a way to quickly
> get Squeak able to access a whole slew of databases on Unix (certainly
> the important ones: Oracle, Sybase, Informix, SQL Server, ...).

Sorry, I wasn't very clear: I've used Squeak with ODBC on Windows, Linux,
and Mac OS X, and been grateful for it.  However, unlike Dolphin or other
Windows-only systems, Squeak cannot (IMO) rely on ODBC to provide
database abstraction.  Installing and configuring the ODBC
libraries on unix or Mac OS, and making them work with Squeak, is a
non-trivial chore, whereas the MySQL driver, for example, works as soon as
you file it in - even, I imagine, on an Acorn ;).





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