Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: HDBC or HSQL

Hi, I was also wandering between these different db-libs and thanks for your information. I tried several (HDBC, HSQL, HaskellDB) and made only small trials. HaskellDB has quite many examples on wiki that gave a quick start to further trials. But, I wasn't able to tell that some of the fields have default values and then it was already time to move on to the HSQL and HDBC trials. Is it possible to use sql-array-types with HDBC with postgresql? I don't remember was this the reason why I eventually tried HSQL - anyhow, it was rather difficult to get started with HDBC but the src test cases helped here. One example in a wiki would do miracles :) HSQL didn't have the array-types but it took only couple of hours to add "a sort of" support for those. There are some problems though... (indexed table queries returning some nulls is not yet working and ghci seems to be allergic to this) I was even wondering, should I propose a patch in some near future for this. But if HDBC can handle those sql-arrays or if you can give a couple of hints, how to proceed in order to add them there, given your view below, I'd be willing to try to help / to try to use HDBC. br, Isto 2007/7/30, John Goerzen :

On 2007-07-25, George Moschovitis wrote:

...

I am a Haskell newbie and I would like to hear your suggestions regarding a Database conectivity library:

HSQL or HDBC ?

which one is better / more actively supported?

I am the author of HDBC, so take this for what you will.

There were several things that bugged me about HSQL, if memory serves:

1) It segfaulted periodically, at least with PostgreSQL

2) It had memory leaks

3) It couldn't read the result set incrementally. That means that if you have a 2GB result set, you better have 8GB of RAM to hold it.

4) It couldn't reference colums in the result set by position, only by name

5) It didn't support pre-compiled queries (replacable parameters)

6) Its transaction handling didn't permit enough flexibility

I initially looked at fixing HSQL, but decided it would be easier to actually write my own interface from scratch.

HDBC is patterned loosely after Perl's DBI, with a few thoughts from Java's JDBC, Python's DB-API, and HSQL mixed in.

I believe it has fixed all of the above issues. The HDBC backends that I've written (Sqlite3, PostgreSQL, and ODBC) all use Haskell's C memory management tools, which *should* ensure that there is no memory leakage.

I use it for production purposes in various applications at work, connecting to both Free and proprietary databases. I also use it in my personal projects. hpodder, for instance, stores podcast information in a Sqlite3 database accessed via HDBC. I have found HDBC+Sqlite3 to be a particularly potent combination for a number of smaller projects.

http://software.complete.org/hdbc/wiki/HdbcUsers has a list of some programs that are known to use HDBC. Feel free to add yours to it.

-- John

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-- br, Isto