Stephen Boyd wrote:

> I can't speak for all Firebird users but personally I rarely have a
> reason to resort to coding on the API directly. There are so many
> good abstraction layers available there is really very little reason
> to get down and dirty with the API.
>
> Really what you are talking about is building yet another another
> abstraction layer. If it were me, I would simply find one of the
> existing abstraction layers and use it rather than trying to
> re-engineer the existing API.
>
>

The C API is dreadful. The original design was targeted for
preprocessor generated code and 4GL use, not application programmers.
The DSQL interface was a crude, client side hack based on the DB2 call
interface. Borland moved the DSQL API in the engine in what they
considered to be culturally compatible with the OSRI calls, but pretty
much made a hash of it.

There is no excuse to have anything a ugly as a SQLDA in this day and age.

A vastly better approach is to the the C++ binding of the JDBC API in
Vulcan. It is simple, flexible, and semantically equivalent to probably
the strongest general SQL API in the industry.


--
James Starkey, Senior Software Architect
MySQL Inc., Manchester, MA, but not quite yet Sun.
Office: 978 526-1376