General Purpose Database Interface Adapter for TCL

Sean Woods

One particularly popular use for TCL today is to interact with SQL and SQL-like databases in script. The problem is that each engine seems to use a completely different methodology to implement TCL bindings. Code designed to talk to one binding has to be completely re-engineered to talk to another, or the developer is forced to pass all of his or her commands to a compadibility layer.

This paper will present a general purpose DBI (database interface) that provide adaptors for most of the common backends TCL is called to interface with. This interface will provide a generic 'this will work with everyone' set of commands, that can be overridden to exploit specific features of each. It's goal is to give developers one good way to talk to any database system and driver.