LISP - Oracle

[lau@darpa.mil]

Bruce,
   At DARPA,  we've been using MCL 2.0 to gen SQL,  send it to a remote
Sybase database server,  and parse the results in MCL.

   We currently use MacTCP as the transport mechanism,  and a small C
program with its own socket number run from the inet daemon on the Unix server 
to pass the database requests and results back through TCP.

   We currently pass back query results in an ascii list of rows,  each of 
which is list of double-quoted field values.  The whole result is parsed by 
read-from-string, into a list structure of rows containing strings.

   This mechanism is both fast and reliable,  and required minimum code to
create. Each query is a transaction,  which is issued and returns very much
like it would in an interactive glass-tty SQL session. 

    The only problem has been double quotes imbedded in the data,  and
we are planning to fix this by delimiting by length number rather than special
character.

    The same technique would definitely work with Oracle,  writing a small C
program to access their C library instead of Sybase DB-Library.


Lawrence Au

   


------------------------ Forwarded Message -----------------------
Date: 8-18-92  9:57am EDT
From: {72110.1107@compuserve.com}:ddn:darpa
  To: lisp:mis:darpa
Subj: LISP - Oracle
----------------------------------------------------------------------
I need to generate SQL in MCL 2.0, send it to a remote Oracle database server,
and parse the result in MCL.  I would like MCL to have control of this entire 
transaction.

Has anyone attempted to communicate with Oracle using MCL?

Did anyone attend Cris Kobryn's "Interfacing Lisp to SQL Databases" tutorial 
at the "Second International Lisp Users and Vendors Conference"?

Bruce Lester
The Pillsbury Company
Minneapolis, MN 55402