On May 15, 2007, at 12:38 PM, M.-A. Lemburg wrote: > On 2007-05-15 18:06, Art Protin wrote: >> Dear folks, >> I have lots more questions about ways that the API could and >> possibly >> should be enriched. > > There have been some discussions about this, but since no standard > API could be found, no additions to the DB-API were made. > > ODBC has a very complete set of catalog functions for querying > meta-data of a database. It works by creating result sets that you > can then fetch using the standard DB-API tools, so it's fairly > straight forward to use. > > Internally, most ODBC drivers map these function calls to standard > SQL SELECTs which work against the internal system tables or call > special stored procedures in the database to create the result sets. > > I suppose the same could be done at a Python interface level (which > could be the DB-API level or a level above the DB-API).
the "standard" for database metadata are the information_schema tables/views, they are part of ANSI 2003. Currently, there is support for information_schema in postgres, mysql, SQL Server 7, and possibly Oracle. At least for the PG/mysql implementations, they are not compatible with each other and in the case of MySQL does not even provide complete information as compared its built-in commands. also information_schema is implemented as views within PG and have some performance issues. Id also say that the structure of information_schema is way too complicated for typical usage and is not intuitive at all...then again an API/schema that is intentionally simplified might not provide full flexibility. >> 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? > > This can normally be done using standard .execute() calls. .callproc is better since it accounts for in/out parameters. > >> 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? > > No. The DB-API is about relational databases and SQL as query > language. The interfaces may also be suitable for other query > languages, but that's out of scope for the DB-API. agreed _______________________________________________ DB-SIG maillist - DB-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/db-sig
