On 2/4/00 12:06 PM, Andrew M. Kuchling at akuchlin@mems-exchange.org wrote:
Christopher Petrilli writes:
We'd be ecstatic if the Python community made more adapters, but we currently support Sybase and Oracle, and its a pretty big burden given we add no value to the equation. If you were to offer an Informix adapter that you supported, all the Informix people would love you, as would we. ;-)
Note that writing a DA isn't documented, and there's no test suite for verifying a DA's correct operation.
Actually it has been documented for several months, I wrote a HOW-TO and announced it to the list with a resounding THUD. I'm currently working with our ODBC DA effort in a closed loop to try and improve it. You can find it here: http://www.zope.org/Members/petrilli/WritingADA It was put up 11/3/1999. As for no test suite, this is a correct assertion, and we are working to create regression code for all things, but it's a slow process.
We use an mxODBC DA that I hacked out of the Oracle DA (I haven't yet gotten around to releasing it -- I know, I know...). A little while ago, it started occasionally raising an exception about the connection being broken and I haven't yet tracked down the cause. It's probably a bug in my code, but it might be a bug in the Oracle DA that I used as a starting point. Maintaining sychronization with the Oracle DA would be tedious.
It shouldn't be hard to use it as a basis for what needs done though, especially after reading the HOW-TO.
I found that the Oracle DA doesn't really have to change very much to use mxODBC. Maybe this is an argument for pushing the whole Oracle DA into some standard product, where you'd write a single adapter module for each new database, rather than copying the whole DA over and over again.
This was the goal of the DB-API, but we don't need most of it. This is the point of ODBC as well. Push the standard further down the stack: +-------------+ | ZOPE | +-------------+ | SQL Methods | +-------------+ | DA | +-------------+ | DB-API | +-------------+ | OCI | +-------------+ | Oracle | +-------------+ Instead what we'd really like to see is something more abstract below DB-API. I talked a lot with the ActiveState guys at the conference on this one. It's a long road, but Python is sorely lacking in comparison to Perl in this arena, and we can't solve it alone. Chris -- | Christopher Petrilli Python Powered Digital Creations, Inc. | petrilli@digicool.com http://www.digicool.com