Re: Example DB API, was Re: [Schematics-development] Re: News

[Bruce B. <ba...@en...>]

Noel Welsh wrote:
> --- Bruce Butterfield <ba...@en...> wrote:
> 
>>Noel Welsh wrote:
>>This may be biting off a bit much since it gets
>>deeply into the areas of 
>>"what is a database" and "what is a connection" that
>>each DBMS seems to 
>>have it's own ideas about. Certainly Oracle, Sybase,
>>and Postgres have 
>>different concepts here. 
> 
> 
> Could you briefly expand a bit here?  I'm not aware of
> the differences.  That said, create- and delete- (or
> drop-) database are useful for testing purposes (so
> you can write tests that create a new db for each test
> and delete it afterwards; fast in Firebird but I guess
> you don't do that in Oracle ;-)  but I'm happy to
> leave them out of the API.  It doesn't look like JDBC
> supports them, for instance.
> 

Oracle considers a database an instance of an Oracle process(s); users 
have GRANT permissions on sets of tables, instances, tablespaces, etc. 
Sybase and Postgres have 'actual' database subdivisions within the DBMS; 
they are created and managed outside of SQL as administrative tasks.

I don't think there is anything wrong with wrapping a test in a 'create 
database'/'drop database' script (which itself could be written in 
Scheme); it just shouldn't be part of the API.