Simple DB Access

[Logan, Martin]

I have been working with Erlang for many years now.  I love it.  It is
bar none the best platform for creating distributed applications out
there.  In the face of that *fact* Erlang has not hit the main stream
yet.  There are probably a few small reasons why it has not, one of them
is undoubtedly the lack of a quick and painless database access library.
I have lamented this fact ever since I did my first erlang application
and had to use some terrible 3rd party odbc package to connect my app
with Sybase.  I love mnesia and ets as much as the next guy but the
simple fact of the matter is that enterprise stores its data in
relational databases. 

 

As I move up the corporate ladder I will continue to be an advocate of
Erlang, I will advocate it in those places where it makes sense for the
operational efficiency of my company.  The lack of an easy, clean, and
professional quality way to integrate with the heart of enterprise is
one impediment to being able to use it without fear.  No manager wants
to justify the learning curve of some new language and on top of that
show many hours having to be devoted to installing and debugging quirky
odbc on unix packages.  It is also hard to get buy in from a team that
is used to Java, python or perl when they find out that they have to
jump through hoops just to do something they typically take for granted.
I don't think this is a community project, I think that the core erlang
team has to take this up and create a database access package similar to
that in perl, ruby, python etc.  Having quick and painless mysql access
would be a great start.  I don't know if there are many business drivers
at Ericsson for something like this, though I would be surprised to find
out there are none, but I would be willing to bet the download
statistics show how valuable this addition is the minute it is released.


 

Cheers,

Martin

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