On 2005-08-18, Brian Strand
I'm thinking about (re)writing some perl code in Haskell (for performance and correctness reasons). Has anyone done much with Oracle and Haskell? So far
Not Oracle specifically, but other databases, both free and proprietary.
Before I wade in too deep, I'm wondering if anyone has done much "business app" programming with Haskell (where "business app" is rather fuzzily defined as database access, web UIs, interfacing with various systems over ip, etc.). Does anyone have any advice? eg "don't go there" or "works great!" or "try OCaml" :) .
I'm doing a lot of it. There's a good deal of web and database activity going on here. Haskell is also my language of choice for scripting projects, especially data transfer (thanks in part to my FTP library in MissingH <g>) I use HSQL for everything database-related. HaskellDB did not work out well. It proved rather buggy, cumbersome, inflexible (it appeared to be impossible to do a "SELECT" without "DISTINCT"), and poorly-scalable (try having it scan a database with several thousand tables). HSQL is more low-level, but I'm comfortable with that, having used Perl's DBI and Python's DB-API before. HSQL natively supports the common Free databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, etc.) We use PostgreSQL for everything that we can. It's no less speedy than MySQL when correctly tuned, and far more reliable. It also seems to be a heck of a lot easier to install and work with than Oracle ;-) One of our more important systems is in a Progress database. They provide their own ODBC system for Unix. HSQL has an ODBC interface, and it took only minor tweaking to port it from unixODBC to Progress's ODBC. Configuration was trickier, but that was more because of poor docs from Progress. It is working highly reliably for us. I would suspect that you could find Oracle drivers for either unixODBC, or some custom ODBC system that is nearly API-compatible. Once you have that, you have HSQL. You didn't mention what platform you're on, but if you're on Windows, I'd imagine you'd have no problem making ODBC work. Unix is slightly more tricky, but again, I'd check out the unixODBC route. It's included in Debian by default, and I wouldn't be surprised if other OSs/distros have it too. -- John