John, Thank you for your reply. I benchmarked HDBC.ODBC with MySQL and it is indeed working well. So whatever slow results I used to get were due to that particular setup. It looks that HDBC will suit my needs as well. Thanks, --A
What's more, HDBC has a stronger and more versatile API than HSQL, which permits even more speed improvements. Features such as precompiled queries can be huge for many apps, as can referencing result columns as an ordered list instead of an association list or map.
Personally, I spent the time to write the Sqlite3, ODBC, and PostgreSQL bindings for HDBC owing to existing needs. I have no need for a MySQL binding because I avoid MySQL wherever possible, and where not possible, use ODBC.
That said, the API is designed to make development of database backends easy. FFI also is quite nice. It should not be a significant task for an interested party to write a MySQL backend. I think it has not happened yet because the ODBC backend is fully functional for MySQL.
-- John