Combining MCL and Oracle7

[Joey Gray <gray@ils.nwu.edu>]

Greetings,

I have been charged with combining MCL (2.0p1) and an Oracle7 database
using
the SQL*Net product from Oracle, and I'm in desperate need of any
assistance.
Essentially, I must access data residing on a remote database server from
an
MCL-generated application. The problem is that Oracle does not supply Lisp
methods or functions for accessing the remote database with their SQL*Net
stuff -- only C and Pascal (at least, that's what we've got) libraries. I
understand that I'll probably have to write some "core" routines in C (or
Pascal) that use the supplied libraries and Oracle's funky pre-compilers,
and then some "wrapper" routines in Lisp that encompass the core routines
via the foreign function interface stuff I've found in the MCL
documentation.
None of this looks like rocket science, I'm just hoping that somebody has
already done something like this, and would be willing to share some
horror-stories/tips/advice/horror-stories/help (can you tell I'm not
excited
about doing this? well, I'm not!)

Again, any help that anybody can offer in any of the above aspects is most
appreciated! Thanks!

-joey

========================================================================
Joey Gray                                   | gray@ils.nwu.edu
Institute for the Learning Sciences         | (708) 467-1704
Northwestern University                     |
Bandwagon disclaimer: My opinions are mine, not my employer's. so there.