[plt-scheme] Re: oracle driver for PLT?

Hi all,

thanks a lot for your answers!
Please don't misunderstand me - I would surely not be able to
introduce such a driver at my workplace (or even scheme at all, it's
Java and legacy C++ only, unfortunately) - but the reason is I might
perhaps get involved with Oracle administration there and it would
surely be a great incentive to learn Oracle if I could combine it with
scheme programming :-)

Regarding development, as I understand the OTN license you are free to
download any edition as long it's for development purposes only.
Still, I think I might need to install a virtual machine with Linux as
I don't see any Mac OS version of Oracle 11g.

As for the network vs. FFI approach, I was searching the Oracle
documentation for it and it seems to me that the network approach is
impossible, as it uses a proprietary network protocol (called TTC)
from Oracle. Other languages mostly seem to use the C library (OCI),
apart from the JDBC thin driver for Java, but this uses the
proprietary Oracle protocol and is delivered by them. Perhaps I'm
wrong here, please correct me if anyone knows better.

Geoff,

> I encourage the pure Scheme approach.  I recently made the switch to  
> (planet jaz/mysql:1:4) because "it just works."  For several years  
> I've used C & FFI to talk to MySQL (David Van Horn's perfectly good  
> package) , but I recently got burned when I got a new Mac,

may I ask a very stupid question: I don't really know how to find out
whether a library uses 32bit or 64bit (even I don't know, is this a
feature of a single library, or of the system)? Could you tell me how
to find out such things on a Mac? (For this, as the concept itself is
not too clear for me I would not even know how to find out on Linux,
but I must admit that even if I know something on Linux I sometimes
have problems when things are different on the Mac...)

Thanks a lot to everyone
Sigrid