Question

In our current project, we need some high level DBI for different databases. It should provide the following features:

• in memory cache – the DBI should be able to cache all reads, and update the cache on writing calls (the application we are coding on is heavy threaded, and needs fast access to the current data all the time). The memory cache will be based on boost::multi_index
• automatic sql building – We don’t want to parse a sql statement to lookup in the memory cache

As we need to provide functions for: defining a table layout, do selects, do inserts, do updates, joins, …, the interface will get very complex.

We need a good way to invoke the interface function.

There are many styles around, but we could not find any useful for our usage.

Here a few examples:

SOCI

sql << "select name, salary from persons where id = " << id, into(name), into(salary);

We don’t want some SQL statements, so we would have to define what and from a different way.

pqxx

Conn.prepare("select_salary",
    "select name, salary from persons where id = $1")
    ((string)"integer",prepare::treat_direct);

The heavy usage of the overloaded operator() is just ugly, but it could work for us too.

Any suggestions how to design the interface?

Answer 1

How about using object relational mapping? Here’s some code fragment ideas off the top of my head – I’ve only done this in Python, never in C++, and only for fairly simple databases. There’s a list of frameworks on Wikipedia that should avoid too much wheel-related R&D.

class people: public dbi_table
{
    // id column handled by dbi_table.
    name: string_column;
    salary: money_column;
};

class cost_center: public dbi_table
{
    name: string_column;
    office: foreign_key<offices>;
};

class people_cost_center_link: public link_table
{
    // Many-many relationships.
};

Then you can manipulate records as objects, all the relational stuff is handled by the framework. Querying is done by defining a query object and then getting an iterator to the results (see the ODB wikipedia page for a code example).