generic sql [wasRe: The Gnucash database?]

[Jean-David Beyer]

Linas Vepstas wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 10:02:44PM -0500, Perry Smith was heard to remark:
> 
>>Would "ODBC" work for this?  (As a low level common denominator  
>>database interface.
> 
> 
> ODBC sucks rocks; libdbi is much better.
> 
> Neither ODBC nor libdbi nor any of the other API's provide any actual
> abstraction of SQL whatsoever. That has to be done at higher layers.
> 
> I suspect DB2 and postgres are quite compatible, that's not
> a problem.  It's MySQL failure to adhere to standards that
> causes all the pain :)
> 
> For example, it would be "very easy" to convert the current postgres
> backend to use libdbi (and maybe a bit harder to use ODBC); however,
> it would still not work for mysql in a deep and fundamental way.
> Might get lucky with DB2, though, I dunno.
> 
> --linas
> 
I have DB2 UDB V8.1.6 on my machine that I use for something else. But it 
can certainly handle more than one user and more than one database.
I also managed to get the regular GnuCash (gnucash-1.8.8-0.9) from RPMs to 
run after a lot of work that need not be repeated here. My OS is Red Hat 
Enterprise Linux 3 ES.

I have the disk space necessary to run another copy of GnuCash with a DB2 
back end if it is not too difficult to install it. If the current 
development team already have access to DB2, they would be better 
qualified to test it themselves, but if no machines with DB2 on it are 
available, I might be able to run tests. I would need a lot of 
hand-holding as I have never successfully built gnucash, though I tried at 
one time. I cannot lose the ability to run my working version of GnuCash 
though, so I would need some means to segregate the test version from the 
working version.

Putting the executable code into /usr/local/bin/ and /usr/local/lib would 
be part of the job (not difficult, I imagine) since the current version is 
in /usr/bin and /usr/lib.

I am not sure what to do about /etc/gnucash (I never looked at it): it 
might be OK to leave it alone.

/usr/libexec/gnucash, /usr/share/gnucash, /usr/share/man/man1/gnucash.1.gz 
would need to be thought about.

I suppose I would put a new user in the system so as not to mess up 
existing users (only 2 users at the moment).


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