The major database servers all listen on different ports: MySQL on 3306, Oracle on 1521, PostgreSQL on 5432, SQL Server on 1433, DB2 7.x on 50000, DB2 8.x on 60000, etc.

Proposed is a database daemon that listens on all of these ports, emulating whatever features are available to allow freedom in client driver selection. Some features are not 1:1, such as separating users from databases in Oracle or creating materialized views in MySQL, but for schemas and applications written to be portable, I don't see how implementing only the ODBC-compatible features would be completely impossible.
-- kevinthenerd, Sep 25 2013

So like ODBC/JDBC, only server-side? I've come across hosts who's only job it was to act as a single "datamart" for single-stop-shop retrieval by downstream systems that kind of did something like this - but the way it did it was to act as a multi-driver repository that used Oracle JDBC to connect to oracle, and MySQL JDBC to connect to MySQL etc and then exposed the results via its own proprietary XDBC drivers/API.
-- Zeuxis, Sep 25 2013


"So like ODBC/JDBC, only server-side?"

Yes.
-- kevinthenerd, Sep 25 2013


So, given that the client is required to use only "standard" syntax (presumably already supported by the underlying DBMS), does this proposed daemon do anything apart from juggle ports? Not that it has to, necessarily - I'm just checking in case I've missed something.
-- pertinax, Sep 25 2013


This seems like a solution looking for a problem. Why would you ever need to do this?

A better way of doing things is to simply abstract away the database interface entirely. I've built a few apps with Ruby on Rails using SQLite, MySQL, and PostgreSQL, and I've had to change exactly zero lines of application code to switch between them. You just pick your database type in the config file, and it all Just Works.
-- ytk, Sep 25 2013


I'm with [ytk] on that one.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Sep 25 2013



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