[Libreoffice-qa] automated testing of Base

[Alexander Thurgood]

Hi Terry,

Le 06/10/11 16:40, Terrence Enger a écrit :

I can only speak from my perspective of an "enterprise" user, and thus
possibly biased ;-)

> Do we have a feeling for what databases are most used "for real" with
> Base? Or how they are used? 
ODBC is still used as an enterprise-wide solution in many places because
of its generally good performance, usually much better than the
corresponding JDBC drivers especially with regard to OOo/LibO. The whole
Java encapsulation thing always had performance issues that ODBC simply
did not. That being said, there seem to be far more actively maintained
JDBC drivers around these days than ODBC drivers, probably because it
fell under the "write once/run anywhere" (uh-huh) motto that was touted
for years with Java development.

> Or what open bugs are most deserving of attention? 
Too many to be reasonably approached by one person in a lifetime ;-) 
Just kidding, but there are quite a few, as with the other modules, and
depending on who you ask, they _all_ deserve attention (grin).


> How much real use is through ODBC as compared to JDBC as compared to
> built-in drivers? 
Hmm, like I said, from what I have seen being used in various companies,
JDBC would appear to come out tops in usage terms because of its
platform/OS agnosticity.

The built-in "native" ones are however highly appreciated because they
appear seamless and don't depend on Java...and on the whole their
performance rocks, whereas JDBC performance within LO dives rapidly,
depending on the release version of Java, the driver itself, and the
poor memory management within Base where everything has to be loaded and
held in memory until you write out it all back out in the IOstream to
the file.

I had always implemented ODBC enterprise wide in earlier versions of OOo
on Linux because (1) there were no native drivers at the time, and (2)
performance was excellent with ODBC, but many ODBC solutions for some db
engines are only available for one or two OSes (for example on Mac, it
is a rather large PITA no thanks to Apple), which obviously is a serious
slug in the chest when you have heterogenous environments. That is why
the native cross-platform driver is so appealing :-)))))

Obviously, all of the above just represents my small window on the world
of DB connectivity that I've either experienced, implemented or come
across in the last 20 years.

Alex