[Haskell-cafe] MySQL and HDBC?

[Chris Waterson]

On Jan 25, 2009, at 4:25 AM, Yitzchak Gale wrote:

> o Transactions - if a connection does not support transactions,
> dbTransactionSupport should return False, and commit and rollback
> should raise errors. (SqlError I suppose?) Not warnings.

You probably already know this, but...the problem is that the
"connection" doesn't really have anything to do with supporting
transactions in MySQL; the storage engine that backs a particular
table does.  A single connection can interact with tables that are
backed by a variety of different storage engines.  In fact, you can
mix tables from different storage engines in a single *statement*.

To strictly implement HDBC's semantics, I could report that a MySQL
connection doesn't support transactions, ever.  Internally, I'd turn
on auto-commit to force each statement to run in its own transaction,
always.  This is certainly correct, however, it severely limits the
utility of the driver IMO.

For now, I've opted to do (essentially) what the ODBC driver does with
MySQL connections.  Namely, I trust the programmer to use the driver
correctly, and fail silently if he misuses this privilege.  I don't
love this, but it seems to be the way MySQL is generally dealt with in
other languages.

It is possible for me to detect when a ROLLBACK has been issued
against a non-transactional table.  In this case, I could raise an
error; however, doing this would be different behavior than the ODBC
driver.  (Besides being too late for the programmer to do anything
about it!)  But perhaps this is preferable?

> o Threading - see the section at the bottom of the Haddock page
> for a nice specification of what the driver needs and does not need
> to support.

Gah.  I don't know how I missed this.  Thanks for pointing it out.

> Also -
>
> o Non-ASCIIText - OK for now, but MySQL has significant
> support for Unicode and encodings, so that should be on
> the to-do list.

Agreed.

thanks!
chris