[syslog-ng] abandon libdbi and write a new sql driver?

[Balazs Scheidler]

On Thu, 2011-01-20 at 13:17 -0700, Patrick H. wrote:
> Reading through the mailing list lately I've seen a fair amount of
> problems reported with libdbi. Given that it also doesnt support
> prepared statements which is a very important feature, I'm wondering
> if libdbi should just be dropped entirely. Libdbi seems to be of use
> to applications that want just very basic sql support, and not for
> anything involving high performance or reliability.
> 
> I know its no small undertaking to write a new DBI for all the common
> databases out there, but if syslog-ng is supposed to be
> high-performing, libdbi does not fit in with that. I dont know if it'd
> be best to start a new project to replace libdbi but accomplish the
> same thing of providing a common API for all databases, or to just
> write separate modules for syslog-ng 3.2+ for each database out there.
> Writing modules would certainly be easier as they could be written
> independently by people who best know each database API.
> 
> 
> This is all just my opinion, but I for one am all for it. In my
> production environment, we do logging to a database, and libdbi just
> didnt have the flexibility or performance we needed, so I ended up
> writing a separate program which connects to the database to perform
> the inserts. Would be nice to avoid having to do that.
> I know I've also heard many recommendations of piping out to a perl
> script to do the inserts. A perl script should never do its job faster
> than C code.

Honestly I was thinking about forking libdbi/libdbi-drivers as we do
have a couple of changes and upstream is not really doing regular
releases. And that's the key problem. libdbi is basically stalled as a
project and without them releasing bugfixes is causing us and our users
pain.

But I don't see anything against libdbi per-se, within syslog-ng a
similar API would be needed to cover all database APIs, so why reinvent
the wheel?

-- 
Bazsi