Databases

Bear with me for a moment...

First and foremost, this post is *not intended in any way* to criticize the work of anyone who could have worked on those packages/projects/frameworks.

Now, I'll tell you a story to make my point.

Often times, in public or in private, I help newcomers on Quora, IRC, the mailing list(s) or elsewhere with various Smalltalk environments.  Often times, I try to be helpful getting them started on Squeak or Pharo.  Often times, they are just amazed by how powerful Smalltalk is... 

Now, the sad part.  Everything goes well until they just want to "code something" to experiment and they ask me about databases...

-How can I connect to a MySQL (or insert your favorite database here) with Squeak/Pharo ?


As far as I can remember, the database connectivity with Squeak/Pharo has always been an area where, as a Squeak/Pharo community, we suck big time.  I don't recall the last time I loaded a package, ran the tests and everything was fine.  There is almost ALWAYS something broken with the databases packages.  Understandibly, Squeak and Pharo were for a long time moving targets.  Whether it was VM changes (FFI, NativeBoost, uFFI, 32 vs 64 bit, OS differences/problems, differences between Squeak and Pharo, etc), code refactoring (cryptography class name changes), the DateAndTime/Timestamp/TimeStamp/Date(Magnitude)/Date(Timespan) were used from one version to the other in the driver, code that was removed by some cleanup, compiler changes/problems/incompatibilities, etc.  In other words, database connectivity needs some love.

Unfortunately, it looks like there doesn't seem to be a consensus or a shared desire to fix things *together*.  There is duplicate effort all over the place.  Just as an example, I listed the various implementations of MySQL packages that exists (I did not list the 8-9 of them that had no code but a project listed on one of those sites).  So, let's say you are a newcomer and you want to connect to a MySQL database.  Here are the choices you are offered (and remember, as a newcomer, you have NO clue which one to pick) :


Databases supported : Project name

1) SqueakSource

MySQL : Automatic Object Storage To MySQL
OpenDBX
SqueakDBX


2) SmalltalkHub

DBX/Talk / DBXDatabaseModel
GlorpDriverMySQL
PharoExtras / ODBC
DBXTalk / Garage
UDBC
UDBC2

3) GitHub.io

dbxtalk

4) GitHub

pharo-rdbms/garage

Now, let's say you picked one package.  In some cases, if you are lucky, the code will load without any problem or warning.  And then, you run the tests.  That is where it almost *always* breaks!

Today, I tried to load *each and everyone of them* in a Pharo 6.1 (Windows) image : none of them worked right out of the box!

In other words, that newcomer I told you about just goes from "WOW!!!" to "WHAT?!?!" in 10 seconds.  People are usually not so impressed with a TestRunner that fails a gazillion unit tests...

So, now the nice part...

Database connectivity is, in my humble opinion, a MUST for Pharo and Squeak.