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<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>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 *<b><span style='font-weight:bold'>fact</span></b>*
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 3<sup>rd</sup> 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. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>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. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>Cheers,<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>Martin<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
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