I am going to be using a C library to connect and use a PostgreSQL database, I was wondering what are the pros and cons to ODBC and Libpq. From what I can tell, libpq seems to be faster but I was not able to get any clear answers or benchmarks.
Also, is there any other library that might be better then ODBC/Libpq.
ODBC is useful if you want a standard adapter that speaks a similar API for different databases. I personally think it's an awful API, but it's widely understood and well documented.
libpq talks more directly to PostgreSQL. You can get better performance with it, but probably not enough more that it'll make any difference for most apps, which spend time on query execution, network latency, etc, not in the client library.
Newer versions of psqlODBC are built on libpq and serve as an ODBC wrapper for libpq.
There's also libdbi, which offers a less ghastly API than ODBC.
For completeness, there's also the server-backend SPI, which can be used by user-defined functions written in C and loaded into the PostgreSQL server. It's not useful outside server extensions and functions.
Oh, and there's ecpg. Don't use ecpg. It's a super-legacy language-integrated-SQL tool that exists mainly for easier porting from certain other database engines. Don't use ecpg. Really.
For C++ there's the QtSQL interface (unusually for Qt, it's awful and painfully limited, don't use it) and libpq++ (OK but largely unmaintained).
Personally I write libpq code directly, but that's because I'm working on code that usually goes into PostgreSQL its self. If you can't imagine ever wanting to target anything except PostgreSQL you might want to write libpq code; otherwise probably use ODBC with psqlODBC.
ODBC is generic mostly MS Windows database access interface. Libpq is native PostgreSQL client interface. If you don't need generic interface, don't use ODBC. It is old school unfriendly designed library with high complexity. There is not any advantage against libpq.
Related
I'm interested in studying the 9P FS, currently been reading the source available from these implementations: http://9p.cat-v.org/implementations
Is 9P obsolete? Are you using it for some application?
(also I've found this, some perfomance test between 9P and NFS: http://graverobbers.blogspot.com/2007/08/v9fs-performance-versus-nfs.html)
No, 9P isn't obsolete; I don't know of a protocol that does what it does and is clean and well defined enough to be implemented correctly in almost any language that exists.
9P is used in a variety of systems. A couple of recent uses in arm-js (an ARM emulator) and 9webdraw (a GSoC project that implements the Plan 9 /dev/draw). Both are HTML5 Javascript implementations.
Just to add a bit, both the Linux client implementation and several servers are under active development, so I'd say that's a pretty clear sign that folks still have use for it. One of the areas its seen heavy use more recently is the virtio-9P (aka virtfs) which is part of qemu/kvm and can be used for direct guest to host file access. It's also been used in several experimental operating systems projects (Libra, PROSE, FusedOS) and incorporated into other operating systems (BSD, MacOSX, Windows, Linux) and hypervisors (in addition to the KVM instance above, its also been incorporated in various ways into Xen). 9P is actually being used in supercomputing deployments (both for Plan 9 and Linux, see the diod project on Sourceforge).
I think the reason is that the protocol is quite simple, so implementations also tend to be quite simple and easy to integrate elsewhere (there are several applications both inside and outside the Plan 9 world which use 9P as an interface to the application, in much the same way that some web developers use RESTful interfaces).
The protocol has a couple of different variations including the 9P.L variant which was developed specifically to match the Linux VFS API better. It adds a bit of complexity to the protocol in the addition of operations, but removes some of the complexity of mapping Linux VFS API -> 9P and vice versa.
It is used in Erlang-on-Xen both as a storage protocol for goofs http://erlangonxen.org/blog/goofs-simple-filesystem
It is the way erlang on xen instances in other ways too, see here:
http://erlangonxen.org/more/9p2000e
Also, it's used by libvirt stuff with QEMU.
http://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/9psetup
9p, to me, is like the Scheme of network protocols. For the most part, it is very simple, but people see need to extend it to fit their environments. Luckily this is done in ways that are often backwards compatible.
In addition to everything mentioned in the other answers, Microsoft is using 9P as part of their Windows Subsystem for Linux.
They add a 9P server to each Linux distribution that is running as a guest, so that Windows can mount the Linux filesystem over 9P, and Windows processes can transparently access the files on Linux's ext4 partition.
Is there any database which can work without any Operating System.
My requirement is, i need to port some code on an embedded device, which runs without OS on a microcontroller. Suggest me the best database or alternate for this scenario.
I think you will implement it on an embedded system. If you write your application using C/C++ try use SQLite. There are SQLite API for C/C++
What you need is a simple key value store, is my guess. It is better you write a small package for the same as conventional databases may be too heavy for your applications.
BTW most higher end embedded systems (routers/switches) these days seem to be using sqite
I took a class named "Secure Code", and in our next assignment we are supposed to do static / dynamic analysis of some C files and of a JavaEE Web Project.
I checked out "Source Monitor" and ran it on the C files, but (unless I didn't get how to use it!) it doesn't seem to do what I'm looking for.
Considering the topic, I'd be interested in knowing if there are tools for detecting "insecure" code, i.e. code that is potentially attackable through buffer overflows, SQL-Injections, XSS ... So I'd like it to point out which functions should be "upgraded" (e.g. fgets instead of gets, or a PreparedStatement instead of a normal SQL statement)
Note: I'd prefer open source softwares, possibly for Windows (I have Ubuntu on a VM but I am not really good with it... I generally spend more time finding out how to configure the tools than running them).
Thank you for your tips!
Frama-C's value analysis is open-source, available pre-compiled for Windows, and was used to find such security bugs as this one in the QuickLZ C library or this one in Polar SSL.
This said, you may find that it is a lot to get used to for just a school assignment, and then again, are you actually expected to find security bugs in a school assignment?
For the JavaEE Web Project use Persistence API, and you can use non-SQL statements, where hacking is theoretically impossible! The best open source one is the Hibernate. It's easy to use and very flexible.
Say I have fancy new algorithm written in C,
int addone(int a) {
return a + 1;
}
And I want to deploy as a web application, for example at
http://example.com/addone?a=5
which responds with,
Content-Type: text/plain
6
What is the best way to host something like this? I have an existing setup using Python mod_wsgi on Apache2, and for testing I've just built a binary from C and call as a subprocess using Python's os.popen2.
I want this to be very fast and not waste overhead (ie I don't need this other Python stuff at all). I can dedicate the whole server to it, re-compile anything needed, etc.
I'm thinking about looking into Apache C modules. Is that useful? Or I may build SWIG wrappers to call directly from Python, but again that seems wasteful if I'm not using Python at all. Any tips?
The easiest way should be to write this program as a CGI app (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.cgi). It would run with any webserver that supports the Common Gateway Interface.
The output format needs to follow the CGI rules.
If you want to take full advantage of the web server capabilities then you can write an Apache module in C. That needs a bit more preparation but gives you full control.
Maybe this tiny dynamic webserver in C to be used with C language can help you.. it should be easy to use and self-contained.
Probably the fastest solution you can adopt according to the benchmarks shown on their homepage!
This article from yesterday has a good discussion on why not to use C as a web framework. I think an easy solution for you would be to use ctypes, it's certainly faster than starting a subprocess. You should make sure that your method is thread safe and that you check your input argument.
from ctypes import *
libcompute = CDLL("libcompute.so")
libcompute.addone(int(a))
I'm not convinced that you're existing general approach might not be the best one. I'm not saying that Apache/Python is necessarily the correct one but there is something compelling about separating the concerns in your architecture being composed of highly focused elements that are specialists in their functions within the overall system.
Having your C-based algorithm server being decoupled from the HTTP server may give you access to things like HTTP scalability and caching facilities that might otherwise have to be in-engineered (or reinvented) within your algorithm component if things are too tightly coupled.
I don't think performance concerns in of themselves are always the best or only reasons when designing an architecture. For example the a YAWS deployment with a C-based driver could be a very performant option.
I have just setup a web service using libmicrohttpd and have had amazing results. On a quad core I've been handling 20400 requests a second and the CPU is running only at 58%. This is probably going to be deployed on a server with 8 cores, so I'm expecting much better results. A very simple C service will be even faster!
I have tried GWAN, it is very good, but it's closed, and doesn't play well with virtual environments. I will give #Gil kudos being good at supporting it here though. We just had a few issues and found LibMicroHttpd works better for our needs.
If you go here, you may need to update your openssl if you're using CentOs from axivo
rpm -ivh --nosignature http://rpm.axivo.com/redhat/axivo-release-6-1.noarch.rpm
yum --disablerepo=* --enablerepo=axivo update openssl-devel
You can try Duda I/O, it only requires a Linux host: http://duda.io
How can I connect to an Oracle database and SQL Server 2005-2008 database with Objective-C?
There seem to be few Objective-C libraries, probably because you can simply use the already available C libraries in Objective-C.
You can:
look at MacSQL Framework (commercial)
use any of the usual C APIs (and possibly wrap them nicely)
use any of the C++ abstractions via Objective-C++