Unicon ODBC Interface Development Page

Welcome to

www.cs.utsa.edu
last update 9/16/2001

This page is the main resource for the Unicon ODBC interface.
Our goal is to let Unicon access local and remote database management systems (DBMS) using the standard Open Database Connectivity (ODBC). This permits a high level of interoperability allowing a Unicon program to access several different DBMSes.

The project initially sponsored sponsored by the National Library of Medicine started on January 1999. Actually Unicon supports the following new functions that let the programmer work with ODBC connections:

`close()`	`dbinsert()`	`dbselect()`
`dbcolumns()`	`dbkeys()`	`sql()`
`dbdelete()`	`dblimits()`	`dbtables()`
`dbdriver()`	`open()`	`dbupdate()`
`fetch()`	`dbproduct()`

We are still designing and improving the interface and deciding which functions to add to the actual core set. I will post the new functions whenever they will be available.

The last idea is to make a minimum set of built-in functions and build an external set of Unicon libraries to handle SQL extensions of each different DBMS. This would also make the runtime system more compact and portable.

Demo Program
This Demo is a simple phonebook application written in Unicon taking advantage of the new ODBC interface and MySQL. You can download phonebook clicking here. If you need Unicon binaries (Win32) with ODBC support click here.

Click here to get the definition of the table used by pb.icn.
E-mail me to request a user id and password on the MySQL sample server, or setup your own SQL server.

Why MySQL?
We are focusing on remote databases in order to run applications over the Internet. MySQL server has been chosen because it is available for almost all platforms and because of its superb performance. As we discussed above this does not mean that Unicon functionality is strictly related to this product. Documentation and other resources about MySQL and MyODBC can be found at http://www.mysql.com. In order to connect to a specific DBMS an application needs its ODBC driver that has to be loaded in the client machine.

MyODBC Cursors
MyODBC 2.50.39 now supports cursors. I expect to add some functionality to the ODBC interface in order to take advantage of this nice feature. Right now in fact the row access is only sequential and there are no positioned operations (like delete or edit current row).

Unicon Binaries
Click here to download Unicon binaries (nticont.exe, nticonx.exe) for Windows with ODBC support.
For more information about new releases of the language contact Dr. Jeffery at NMSU

Unix porting
The initial version of Unicon with ODBC support run under Windows 9x/NT only.
Right now we support both Solaris 2.x and Linux. We are pretty excited about this porting!

Unix versions actually use iODBC Manager but I do not exclude the possibility to use UnixODBC.

Additional material
For more information about Unicon extensions and material please refer to the following project page at SourceForge maintained by Dr. Clinton Jeffery at New Mexico State University.

View/Download the Unicon ODBC Interface Technical Report (PDF format).

Federico Balbi
Division of Computer Science
University of Texas at San Antonio
fbalbi@cs.utsa.edu