Would you like to work on a project to make MySQL available directly from
RPG programs on the System i?
It sounds like something people would want to do. If your customer-facing
web site, for instance, is implemented with PHP over MySQL, it seems that
you'd want to be able to read from and update that MySQL data from your
main line of business applications on your System i.
I'd like to get some notion of how many people (companies, etc) would find
this useful.
There's a little known but published interface in i5OS that permits a
"Application Requester Driver" (ARD) to be registered with the ADDRDBDIRE
command. Once registered, that program can be used by i5OS SQL. All the
parameter lists that i5/OS will use to access the ARD are published here:
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/iseries/v5r4/index.jsp?topic=/api
s/xsqlci.htm. So anyone can build a driver for any database as long as
they comply with the specification. It'd be sort of like ODBC that you
could access from your RPG program or from interactive SQL, or even from
Ops Navigator.
MySQL is just a suggestion. Others could be done, as well. However, MySQL
being open source, we can also know the interface to work with MySQL.
I'm wondering if there is interest from any in this community to
contribute time and talent to an open source project to build such an
interface. I'll watch the list here and if any are interested, I'll start
to put together the resources at COMMON in Nashville next week. I want to
know two things: would you use such a system if it was available, and
would you help to make it happen.
Dan Kimmel
midrange.com
