1.1.7 Bridging the object-relational gap

Relational DBMSes do not in general deal with objects or classes. Since Dylan is an object-oriented language, this creates a gap between Dylan and the DBMS.

The SQL-ODBC library bridges this gap by allowing you to specify a liaison function for results. A liaison function acts as an interpreter for results, taking the records retrieved from the relational DBMS and converting each into suitable Dylan objects. A default liaison method exists for use in situations where your application does not know the appropriate conversion, for example when processing SQL SELECT statements typed in by the application user. The default method transforms each record retrieved into a Dylan collection, where each element of the collection corresponds to a column of the record. See Section 1.5.4 on page 36 for more on liaison functions.

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OLE, COM, ActiveX and DBMS Reference - 31 MAR 2000