RoR, Judge Judy, and little old ladies

[Brad Anderson]

James Dennett wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email) wrote:
> 
>> Interesting. So here's a limitation that might be addressed. Do all of
>> today's database engines (e.g. mysql) offer structure inspection (e.g.
>> "enumerate tables in this database", "enumerate fields in this table"...)?
> 
> In my experience, yes (MySQL does, SQLite does, and all
> of the more traditional RDBMS's do, including PostgreSQL,
> Oracle, DB2, MS SQL Server, and many more).  This level
> of "reflection" is standard.  In older versions of MySQL
> it was accessible only via special APIs, but normally it
> is available via system tables/views with names something
> like SYS_ALL_TABLES, SYS_ALL_COLUMNS, etc., which have
> columns for name, type, etc, so that SQL is the interface
> to this metadata.
> 
> -- James

I am currently attempting to add this metadata to Result objects in DDBI.
Nothing in SVN yet, but I am making progress.  I'm also working on improving
the types that DDBI returns, expanding past just char[].

http://www.dsource.org/projects/ddbi

BA