Re: Building a database interface in Emacs

[jason haslup]

Mathias Dahl <brakjoller <at> gmail.com> writes:

> 
> I have been looking into using Emacs for doing queries etc against an
> Oracle database, for certain work purposes. I use the nice functions
...
> What would be the best approach for doing this? First I tried adding
> something on top of sql.el and comint.el but it seemed overkill as I
> am not interested in a command line interface. My current plan is to
> use `start-process' to start sqlplus in a process, and to send input
> and parse the output I get back from that process.
> 
> Is there any smarter way of doing it?

I did something using comint's filter functions, but it requires having a *SQL*
buffer open to the database you're interested in:

  http://www.haslup.com/index.cgi/emacs/2006/12/20/

I'm not too familiar with sqlplus, but I know the mysql client has a raw mode
and also an XML mode for queries that might help in looking for the end of a
query's results.  Or, if sqlplus doesn't work, I wonder if a simple helper
client using oracle's libraries would be something you could use with
start-process.  Then you could have complete control over the output of the 
data?

jason