Hello,
1. Simple documentation of how to install the library (starting from a vanilla GHC installation on Windows, plus Oracle software, to the point where I can use the library in my code). All I need is Oracle access, so other database client libraries can be ignored. I'd rather not use ODBC, but will if required.
I use HDBC to connect (via the ODBC driver) to a MS SQL Server and a Sybase server (ASE). I'm running on a windows machine inside of cygwin. I had no trouble installing HDBC following the instructions in the distribution with GHC 6.6; by distribution I mean the files hdbc_1.0.1.2.tar.gz (general HDBC library) and hdbc-odbc_1.0.1.1.tar.gz (specific ODBC driver) from the HDBC gopher page (http://gopher.quux.org:70/devel/hdbc).
2. Simple examples on how to actually run a query. For example, how do I code the follwing SQL*Plus code (should be pretty self-explanatory) in Haskell:
connect scott/tiger@mydb select * from emp;
Here is a GHCi session: Prelude> :m Database.HDBC Database.HDBC.ODBC Prelude Database.HDBC.ODBC Database.HDBC>do c <- connectODBC conStr; handleSqlError $ quickQuery c "select * from emp" [] where conStr is an appropriate ODBC connection string (e.g. "DSN = mydb" if you have the DSN defined, or you can find the Oracle string at http://www.connectionstrings.com/). This should cause a list of lists of SqlValues to be printed which represent the rows in your result set. Here is the documentation for HDBC: http://darcs.complete.org/hdbc/doc/Database-HDBC.html Although it is mostly type signatures, there is some explanation. There are also a few useful haskell-cafe discussions on aspects of using HDBC. hope this helps, Jeff