On Jul 18, 2006, at 6:36 AM, Dr Gerard Hammond wrote:
On Jul 17, 2006, at 10:26 PM, C. Wyatt wrote:
The nice thing about using an ODBC solution is that the backend is
less your problem that the client's problem.
Heh?? Ever tried to support a number of different backend systems via
ODBC from different Client OS's?
I have since MacOS 7 and Win95.
Talk about debug everything, everywhere, especially with the old RB
ODBC plugin. Now I avoid ODBC options as much as possible.
The REAL folks have been surprisingly quiet about it, but a new ODBC
Plugin was released as part of RB 2006 Release 3. The new plugin has
many new features that should lead to more straightforward development
of powerful client / server apps.
The two most important features, IMHO, are improved error handling (it
was non-existent before) and the ability to query the driver and
database for specific capabilities through the db.GetInfo method.
Want to know how many pending queries are allowed by the driver? call
db.GetInfo(ODBCConstant.SQL_ACTIVE_STATEMENTS)
How about whether you can use the SQL function CONVERT to convert from
a timestamp to an integer within your SELECT statement? call
bitwise.bitand(db.GetInfo(ODBCConstant.SQL_CONVERT_TIMESTAMP),
ODBCConstant.SQL_CVT_INTEGER)
The new plugin also allows you to get the complete schema information,
including indexes, primary keys and stored procedures, as well as a
list of types supported by the database. On top of that, it now allows
you to add binary data (i.e. a JPEG) to a column through rs.Update -
without requiring special encoding of the data!
I don't doubt that ODBC has been infuriating at times, particularly if
you've been using it as long as you have. But I think the new ODBC
plugin is a leap forward in terms of the power and flexibility it can
give to a cross platform RB application.
Jonathan Monroe
Actual Technologies - ODBC for Mac OS X
http://www.actualtechnologies.com
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