Dear Marcel,
I do not know Postgres very well. However, our team has built a number of
applications using TCL/TK. At present we are using Postgres for our local
database, because we are stuck with Unix until the department as a whole
can upgrade to Windows NT.
Unix don't have certain concepts like ODBC that we take for granted in a
Windows networking environment. Many Unix programmers simply use flat
files for local storage, because database access is so slow, and there is
the additional administrational overhead.... what a bother. For some this
is job security though, writing code that is tightly coupled to everybody
elses code, and nobody else can understand.
As a consequence, data access is coupled tightly to production
applications, making them expensive to build and difficult to maintain. We
survive by decoupling the data access from the applications completely...
by writing a bunch of TCL procedures with well-known names, and putting
them into an incrTCL class. I call it DataServices. It holds all of the
SQL, all of the calls into the Postgress library. The incrTCL class has a
constructor and destructor that connect to and disconnect from, a database.
The advantage of using TCL is that it is a very powerful processor of lists
and strings. A procedure, if it returns a list, or even better a keyed
list (containing the headers and the data, such as "person.name {Rob}",
"person.address {One Buckingham Place}", will simply return a list, an
emplty list if no data matches, or raise an exception which you can handle
with an error dialog, if the database is dead.
This way, when we find a database that gives us better performance and does
not require major hacking, we will only have to rewrite a single class, not
every application that we support.
It would be great to be able to access an Access database from Unix, across
a network. Maybe this Spring I'll have time for a project like this.
I prefer to concentrate on what I WHAT to build, instead of wasting a lot
of time worrying about how to do it! Hacking makes you lose sight of the
big picture. My advice is to stop worrying about documentation, start
experimenting, and decide for yourself, what you like to use. I highly
recommend the Scriptics distribution of TCL/TK called TCLPro, found at
http://www.scriptics.com.
Cheers
Rob
