Metabase

Package of classes that provide DBMS independent access and management of databases.

Currently it features:

o BSD style license.

o Dual API call forms:
* Direct driver class object calls
* Global function calls

o Set of functions that call the selected DBMS driver objects functions supporting when possible:
* Database connection setup with support for connection strings
* Operation error handling
* Query constant data conversion
* Direct queries
* Prepared queries
* Query result rows random access
* Retrieve a limit range of rows of a SELECT query.
* Nested transactions
* Large object fields (BLOBs - storing files in the database)
* Database object creation (tables, indexes, sequences)
* DBMS driver supported feature query

o DBMS Drivers classes that support the most important databases being used on the Web.

o Driver conformance test suite to verify if the driver classes are working and features are properly implemented.

o A parser class that is able to interpret DBMS independent database schemas file defined in a custom XML format supporting the following types of objects:
* Tables with fields of the types: text, integer, boolean, date, time, timestamp, decimal, float, character large objects (CLOBs) and binary large objects (BLOBs), auto-increment.
* Primary keys
* Indexes
* Auto incremented sequences

o A manager class that is able to:
* Install a new database from a schema description interpreted by the parser class.
* Ability to compare a previously installed schema with a new schema and only install the changes without affecting data stored after the previous installation or update.
* Dump database structure and contents in the same XML format handled by the parser allowing for moving data between databases of different DBMS vendors.
* Reverse engineer schemas of already installed databases