Lenz Grimmer's blog

Some time ago I posted a compilation of applications and programming languages that provide an API to connect to the MySQL Server. As it turned out, I forgot a few that I would like to mention here:

• Apache DBD API: a MySQL driver for mod_apr_dbd is not included in the official distribution, but can be obtained seperately from here. Some distributions (e.g. openSUSE) actually provide installable packages of this driver module.
• GRASS MySQL driver: The MySQL database driver in GRASS enables GRASS applications to store vector attributes in a MySQL server. Alternatively, data can be stored in an embedded version of the MySQL Server.
• HDBC: HDBC provides an abstraction layer between Haskell programs and SQL relational databases. This lets you write database code once, in Haskell, and have it work with any number of backend SQL databases.
• libdrizzle: This is the client and protocol library for Drizzle and MySQL that provides both client and server interfaces. A number of APIs (e.g. Java, Lua, Perl and Ruby as well as Python) have been built on top of it, but I'm not quite sure if they all support the MySQL client/server protocol as well.
• MySQL Connector/Python: MySQL Connector/Python is implementing the MySQL Client/Server protocol completely in Python. This means you don't have to compile anything - the MySQL client library doesn't even have to be installed on your system.

Do you know of any other MySQL Connectors/APIs? Let me know!

I recently installed the last  release candidate version of OpenSolaris 2008.11 (ISO image available from here) and I am happy to note that the audiohd driver now supports the Intel soundchip (82891H) in my Lenovo Thinkpad T61 out of the box! This was one of the glitches I observed with 2008.05. In general, I am very impressed by the OpenSolaris driver support for this particular laptop - everything except for bluetooth is supported now. On the downside, suspending to RAM still fails for me, but I have not looked into this very deeply yet.

But what good is a working sound driver, if you don't have apps that produce sounds? Be default, the media players included in the distribution lack support for most codecs, e.g. MP3 or video formats. This is not much different from most Linux distributions, as these codecs are usually protected by patents or proprietary licenses which require the user to install these separately. Here are some hints on how to enable better multimedia support on OpenSolaris.

The Observatory has a detailed article on how to add the free MP3 gstreamer codec from Fluendo, so all applications that use the gstreamer API (e.g. Songbird) will be able to play back MP3 files.

If you want full multimedia support and an choice of video players/codecs, you should add the Life With Solaris (LWS) package repository to the package manager:

$ pfexec pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.lifewithsolaris.jp:10000/ pkg.lifewithsolaris.jp
$ pfexec packagemanager

You will now be able to choose a new package repository from the dropdown list, which allows you to select players and codecs for download/installation. The packages will be installed in /opt/LWS, so you need to add /opt/LWS/bin to your $PATH, if you want to start the applications from the command line. But the packages will create menu entries for the GNOME desktop as well.

Enjoy!

One of the sessions at DrupalCon I attended was Larry Garfield's talk about "Drupal Databases: The Next Generation", which gave me a good insight into the current state of the Drupal database layer and how they plan to overhaul it for Drupal 7. The key points that I took away:

• A new API based on PDO
• Object-oriented, requiring PHP5
• Support for using prepared statements
• A unified access API
• A query builder
• More support for other database systems (currently Drupal supports MySQL and PostgreSQL only). In particular, they are keen on adding SQLite support, to ease local development.
• Support for master-slave replication (by randomly distributing reads among the hosts)
• Support for using different database types in parallel (e.g. using SQLite for read-only tables, MySQL for everything else)

The slides and a video of the presentation are available, if you want to check it out. There is a task list on the Drupal.org web site that keeps track of the ongoing activities.

Being able to use an Open Source DBMS to manage your data is nice, but what good would it be if you can't easily access it from your applications? One key factor to the popularity of MySQL is probably its wide range of available language bindings, which started with support for C, PHP and Perl from early on.

I've tried to gather a list of languages and their respective MySQL drivers/modules below. It's by no means complete or exhaustive, but I think I covered quite a lot of popular as well as exotic programming languages.

There is a number of connectors which are actually developed by the Sun Database Group (aka MySQL) itself and that are ready to use:

• Connector/ODBC - Standardized database driver Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Unix platforms.
• Connector/J - Standardized database driver for Java platforms and development.
• Connector/Net - Standardized database driver for .NET platforms and development.
• Connector/MXJ - MBean for embedding the MySQL server in Java applications.
• MySQL native driver for PHP - mysqlnd - The MySQL native driver for PHP is an additional, alternative way to connect from PHP 6 to the MySQL Server 4.1 or newer.
• libmysql - The original implementation of the MySQL Client/Server protocol (in C). This library is the basis for a large number of client libraries for other languages.

In addition to the above, there are several other connectors developed by Sun/MySQL, which are still under development:

• MySQL Connector/OpenOffice.org - a driver that allows you to connect to MySQL with OpenOffice.org natively, without having to use JDBC/ODBC.
• PHP PDO mysqlnd - a PHP/PDO driver based on the mysqlnd driver
• Connector C++: a driver for C++ applications that uses an API similar to the JDBC 3.0 API.

But it's not only us who develop language bindings for the MySQL server. There is an abundance of drivers that are developed and maintained by the Community, independently from Sun/MySQL (but sometimes with support or guidance from MySQL engineers). The list below is not sorted in any particular order other than the sequence in how I found them over time:

• DBD::mysql - a MySQL driver for the DBI database abstraction layer of Perl scripting language. There used to be a a native driver named "Msql-Mysql-modules", but it does not seem to be maintained anymore.
• Net::MySQL - an implementation of the MySQL Client/Server Protocol in Perl (does not require the MySQL client library). There also is MySQL::Packet, a Perl module that can encode and decode the binary protocol.
• MySQLdb - a MySQL driver for the Python scripting language.
• mysqli, ext/mysqli - MySQL Improved Extension for PHP
• mysql, ext/mysql - MySQL Extension for PHP
• PDO_MYSQL - MySQL PDO driver for PHP
• MySQL/Ruby - the MySQL API module for Ruby, based on the libmysql C library.
• Ruby/MySQL - the MySQL Ruby API, implemented in Ruby.
• MySQL++ - a C++ wrapper for MySQL's C API. It is built around the same principles as the Standard C++ Library, to make dealing with the database as easy as dealing with STL containers.
• MySQL wrapped - another C++ wrapper for the MySQL C API.
• MySQLtcl - a simple API for accessing a MySQL database server from the Tcl programming language.
• MySQL-Cocoa - An Objective-C Cocoa API for MySQL (based on libmysql).
• Eiffel MySQL - an interface to the MySQL database server using the Eiffel programming language.
• Bryan O'Sullivan's pure Haskell MySQL bindings
• hsql-mysql - A MySQL driver for Haskell
• MySQL Driver for the programming language D
• MyDB module for the Kaya programming language (included in the distribution)
• MySQL bindings for the Objective Caml language
• MySQL bindings for GNU Ada
• The SPL programming language ships with a MySQL module included in the distribution
• Database bindings (incl. MySQL) for GNU Octave
• LuaSQL is a simple database interface for the Lua programming language
• erlang-mysql-driver - a revamped MySQL driver for Erlang
• Myscsh - a Scheme implementation of the MySQL protocol

I probably forgot some other drivers/bindings - if you have any more to add, please let me know!

And if you'd like to create your own implementation for your favourite language: the protocol is documented here and here. Jan's additional notes may also be helpful to get you started.