[Haskell-cafe] recommendation for (best) sqlite3 bindings

[Michael Snoyman]

On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 7:54 AM, Gour <gour at gour-nitai.com> wrote:

> Hello!
>
> We are looking for recommendation which Haskell bindings for sqlite3
> to use for destkop GUI app where we want, among other things to store
> *.png and/or *.jpg images. (Yeah, I know about the hint to store
> iamges in the filesystem and just store filepaths in the db, but for
> portability reasons so that user can easily carry/backup database, we
> want everything stored in one file.)
>
> By looking at Hackage, it seems there are 3 candidates:
>
> 1) sqlite - bindings by Galois
> (http://hackage.haskell.org/package/sqlite) - looks quite complete &
> low-level interface
>
> 2) direct-sqlite - it says "It is not as complete as bindings-sqlite3 (1),
> but is slightly higher-level...it supports strings encoded as UTF8,
> and BLOBs represented as ByteStrings." and
>
> 3) HDBC-sqlite3 - higher level but without support for BLOBs.
>
>
> Now, based on the above it looks that 2) is the best one - not
> high-level as 2), but adding BLOBs support which, iirc, is missing in
> HDBC.
>
> Otoh, having highr-level abstraction ala HDBC is nice, although at the
> moment we believe that we won't have need to go to PostgreSQL since it
> means that setup would be greatly complicated for the end-user, so
> we're staying focused on Sqlite3.
>
>
> I know there are also Takusen & HSQL, but based on my past experiences
> when watching those two projects, it seems they aren not supported as
> well as the above itemized ones.
>
> Any recommendation?
>
> May I add that, according to the recent "Merge hsql and HDBC -- there
> can only be one!" thread, I can only "+1" for having slight less &
> more complete database packages.
>
>
> Sincerely,
> Gour
>
> For the sqlite backend for persistent, I took direct-sqlite and modified it
slightly. I have a long history of using the sqlite3 C API, so the API felt
very familiar to me.

If I'm not mistaken, direct-sqlite does not build as-is on hackage because
it's missing a reference to the C library. However, if you take my approach
and just include the code in your library, you can fix that easily enough.

Michael
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