On Sat, May 01, 2010 at 09:25:54AM -0400, Tim Romano scratched on the wall:
> In part, this is a very broad question but I hope it's not unacceptable. > From a birdseye perspective, what is involved in integrating an interpreted > scripting language with a database engine? A number of people have looked into adding some kind of PL/* language to SQLite so that you can store functions, etc., in the database itself. There are third-party folks working on a PL/SQL extension that converts stuff to compiled code, but that's a bit different since it isn't tied directly to the database. It is extremely unlikely anything would ever end up in the core. The biggest issue is license. I know of no public-domain scripting language implementations (that are worth using). Language systems also tend to be big and tricky to test. So you'd still need the correct extension, but you could use the same extension for every database. Adding support for functions, aggregates, and collations is easy enough. Many of the scripting language API wrappers already include stubs that allow functions, etc., to be defined in the scripting language. Triggers are a bit more difficult, unless you can can reduce the logic down to a function. The issue is passing the row state in and out of the function. There may be some clever way of doing it deeper in the library, but I'm not sure it is possible with the public API. I'd love to see a Lua extension. I know that's been proposed. Lua is MIT licensed, small, fast, and reasonably mature. It is also designed to be easily embeddable, making it a good fit. I realize many of you may not know about Lua, but it is heavily used in a number of specific areas, including the game industry, where it is *the* behavioral and AI language, mostly because it is easy to learn, easy to embed, and will compile on just about anything. http://www.lua.org/ -j -- Jay A. Kreibich < J A Y @ K R E I B I.C H > "Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor." "I'll go home and see if I can scrounge up a ruler and a piece of string." --from Anathem by Neal Stephenson _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@sqlite.org http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
