[postmodern-devel] porting Postmodern to SQLite

[Marijn Haverbeke]

Hello Ryszard,

As you are probably aware, the SQL standard is quite limited, and all
database systems I've ever used go beyond it and provide extra
functionality. They tend to all use different syntax for these
extensions, and provide slightly different ones, so I didn't want to
bother with making my library support these different syntaxes or be
some kind of lowest common denominator -- partially because I am lazy,
and partially because I think PostgreSQL is a very solid system which
is pretty easy to set up -- there is rarely a very strong need to use
anything else.

I am afraid that I couldn't quite give a precise list of
Postgres-specific features that Postmodern uses, but just writing a
cl-postgres replacement for SQLite will definitely not be enough --
that only concerns the client/server protocol, and doesn't solve the
problem of SQL syntax and differences in supported features.

I have no idea how well the SQLite interface is documented, and
whether you'd want to implement it in CL or use FFI. Postgres has good
documentation about its protocol, so after studying that, writing the
client was not that hard (apart from having to implement some stuff
like binary floating point decoding).

Cheers,
Marijn