[Libreoffice] Base - sqlite - licence grief

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Wols,

On Mon, 2010-12-13 at 15:16 +0000, Wols Lists wrote:
> > I seem to recall it had
> > something to do with not SQLite not lending itself easily to being able
> > to keep everything in memory and then write an IO stream into and ODF
> > compatible container. Of course, that was back in the days of SQLite 2
> > so maybe things have got better :-) Good luck !!!
..
> Can we put a hsqldb database in an odf container? The stuff I saw about
> sqlite 2 was things like "you can't modify a table". It's a very basic
> engine without a lot of the user-friendly padding.

	Ho hum :-) If you open most ODF files, they tend to uncompress
themselves almost entirely to /tmp/svXXX.tmp/ anyway so ;-)

	However - sqlite does in fact allow you to re-vector the I/O primitives
( in case you think seeking / writing to the middle of a stream in
a .zip file is really a good idea ;-) there is some code to do it here:

http://git.gnome.org/browse/evolution-data-server/tree/camel/camel-db.c#n162

	Having said that, as long as the file was un-compressed, possibly it
would be possible to do some level of modification inside the .zip file
as-is; but really - I don't believe people will (or should) do gigabyte
databases inside a zip file ;-)

> Anyways, in the first instance, I'm treating this as a "teach yourself
> C++" exercise - rather a "jump in the deep end" version :-)

	Great :-)

> I'm quite happy to try and stick my database files in a odf container,
> but seriously, I think that is a triumph of ideology over reality. It'd
> actually be dead easy to dump to XML, but I think the load and save
> times would kill any user-friendliness, even if the database itself was
> cuddly-lamb-friendly.

	You know - the dump to XML thing is not such a terrible idea if it
liberates us from a given implementation of the database backend; and I
don't -know- that it has to be -that- slow (given the size of the
databases we are talking about).

	It would be a wonderful thing to have done generically; a parallel 'XML
stream' version of the database, which we could retro-fit into files for
those poor hsqldb users that need to migrate away.

	Anyhow - interesting stuff,

	All the best,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks at novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot