[Haskell-cafe] HDBC Roadmap

[John Goerzen]

I've had some questions about my intentions for HDBC.  The Current Plan
is:

Release 1.0.0 next week.  Before that happens, I want to have a stable
and useful API.  I have one feature request to implement yet (examinine
properties of arbitrary tables in the database).  I also want to finish
the ODBC driver first, which should happen yet this week.

After that, I will probably also release a MySQL backend.

I hope that HDBC can be a community effort.  Towards that end, I hope to
be able to get some trac pages going on somebody's server and perhaps a
mailing list where ideas and implementations for future enhancements can
be discussed.  I'd also like to be able to help people that would like
to write backends for additional databases.  (I also should announce
hsql-testsuite, the common HUnit suite that is used to test each
database backend.)  The development time for a HDBC backend looks like
about 1 day per database, including the amount of time it takes to learn
that database's C API.  (A bit more for ODBC because its API is weird
and the documentation is unhelpful)

Post 1.0.0, I will spend some time optimizing performance in the
existing database drivers.  There are several opportunities to do that,
and they should yield significant results for certain use cases (such as
inserting thousands or millions of rows of data at once.)

Comments and suggestions are quite welcome.  Patches too ;-)

-- John