
On 12/11/06, Kirsten Chevalier
This is when you write that documentation :-) And I say that without knowing anything about any of the Haskell database libraries -- I just suspect that if you can't find any good documentation for them, that's your cue to write it.
Sorry, I didn't make that clear - I absolutely would be happy to write up whatever I ended up with that works. The point I was trying (badly!) to make was that without sample code on how to do "trivial" queries, I can't work out which library is closest to what I want. And without installation instructions, I can't try them out. What I *can* do, is to attempt to install one of the libraries that looks closest to what I want (probably HDBC, because I'm familiar with the Python DB-API). But I honestly have little or no idea how to start - following the HDBC link on the Haskell Wiki leads to a huge list of tar.gz files, with no indication of which one I might want :-( Option 2, Takusen, leads to a file listing, but no downloadable package. Option 3, HSQL, leads to a page which doesn't mention Oracle support (even though the Wiki page does) so I'm put off trying further...
This might not seem like a helpful answer, but often it's the best answer anyone can give. I realize that you only have so many hours in the day, but only a few people get paid to work on Haskell full-time. So if you really wanted to find out whether the existing libraries would work for your purposes, try it, and write up what you found so that other people can benefit from it.
Will do, but I need help with "try it", and I'm guessing as to which library is my best bet :-( This is my first real experience with trying to obtain and use a 3rd party library with Haskell, so I apologise if these are newbie-level dumb issues. I'm not trying to complain, but I do suspect there is an issue here with easy library availability that the Haskell community could look at. Python was in a similar situation for a long time, and I suspect it's just a bit further down the track. Certainly from what I've seen of Cabal, it's similar in philosophy to Python's distutils. But this is going off on a tangent - maybe I'll revisit it when I've got some more experience under my belt with installing DB libraries :-) Paul.