Dirk, I agree that it would be worthwhile to re-visit what the DBI should provide, and I fully agree that R/S-Plus compatibility should not be a goal. Let me remind you that the DBI at the time it was defined more than 5 years ago was not meant to be a complete specification -- it identified many features that were yet to be formalized into the API (prepared statements, stored procedures, asynchronous communications, transcations, etc.). Some of these features were later added as extensions to packages (e.g., prepared statements in RSQLite by Seth Falcon and in ROracle by me) but it would be better to ensure a common interface for these and other new features.
In terms of data mappings, date/time types are valid concerns, but so are unsigned ints and longs, BLOBS, fixed decimals, money, points, etc. Extending the feature set at this point seems to me like a good idea. Regards, -- David On 6/2/07, Dirk Eddelbuettel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Brian, > > On 2 June 2007 at 19:08, Prof Brian Ripley wrote: > | There are quite a few 'db API' features in RODBC that are not in DBI. > > Random idea of the day: Would it be wortwhile to re-think what the DBI API > should cover? > > These days, it may matter less to be R and S-Plus compatible [1] but e.g. to > me it matters whether I get niceties like POSIXct times in and out of > databases intact, and that doesn't seem be a concern per se for DBI. > > A unified DBI interface is still the right idea, but I'd like to push the > feature set further. But then I know little about the gory details so feel > free to correct me. > > Regards, Dirk > > [1] (or, given who accrues benefits from this, we could make it Insightful's > concern to catch up) > > -- > Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something. > -- Thomas A. Edison > > _______________________________________________ > R-sig-DB mailing list -- R Special Interest Group > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-db > _______________________________________________ R-sig-Geo mailing list R-sig-Geo@stat.math.ethz.ch https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-geo