[Haskell-cafe] MySQL and HDBC?

[John Goerzen]

Chris Waterson wrote:
> 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*.

... for which you have my complete sympathies ;-)

> 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?

To be sure, what happens in the ODBC case depends on what the user puts
in odbc.ini.  The user can indicate for either the full-on error
treatment, or the ignoring the problem for non-transactional tables.

In any case, you and the MySQL user community are probably in a better
position to determine what is the most sensible course of action here
too.  If you feel that the HDBC API needs to become more rich, I'm quite
happy to entertain suggestions there too.

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

There has been recent work in the PostgreSQL backend that could perhaps
be a constructive example.

-- John