On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 7:54 AM, Gour
Hello!
We are looking for recommendation which Haskell bindings for sqlite3 to use for destkop GUI app where we want, among other things to store *.png and/or *.jpg images. (Yeah, I know about the hint to store iamges in the filesystem and just store filepaths in the db, but for portability reasons so that user can easily carry/backup database, we want everything stored in one file.)
By looking at Hackage, it seems there are 3 candidates:
1) sqlite - bindings by Galois (http://hackage.haskell.org/package/sqlite) - looks quite complete & low-level interface
2) direct-sqlite - it says "It is not as complete as bindings-sqlite3 (1), but is slightly higher-level...it supports strings encoded as UTF8, and BLOBs represented as ByteStrings." and
3) HDBC-sqlite3 - higher level but without support for BLOBs.
Now, based on the above it looks that 2) is the best one - not high-level as 2), but adding BLOBs support which, iirc, is missing in HDBC.
Otoh, having highr-level abstraction ala HDBC is nice, although at the moment we believe that we won't have need to go to PostgreSQL since it means that setup would be greatly complicated for the end-user, so we're staying focused on Sqlite3.
I know there are also Takusen & HSQL, but based on my past experiences when watching those two projects, it seems they aren not supported as well as the above itemized ones.
Any recommendation?
May I add that, according to the recent "Merge hsql and HDBC -- there can only be one!" thread, I can only "+1" for having slight less & more complete database packages.
Sincerely, Gour
For the sqlite backend for persistent, I took direct-sqlite and modified it slightly. I have a long history of using the sqlite3 C API, so the API felt very familiar to me.
If I'm not mistaken, direct-sqlite does not build as-is on hackage because it's missing a reference to the C library. However, if you take my approach and just include the code in your library, you can fix that easily enough. Michael