Usage

End-users

The database engine drivers of the libdbi-drivers project are simple to use. After running make install the libdbi framework automatically detects all installed drivers whenever an application linked against libdbi initializes the framework. As the user of an application built with libdbi you do not have to perform any additional configuration steps.

Please note that the corresponding database engine client library is required to run a particular driver. In order to build the driver from the sources, the development files of the client library (headers and .a libraries) are required. Some distributions provide separate packages for the runtime libraries and for the development files.

Developers

libdbi, like any database abstraction layer, tries to hide the differences between the supported database engines as far as possible from the programmer. This should make it painless for the end-user to switch database engines as she sees fit. Currently, libdbi abstracts mostly at the API level. Currently there are no facilities to work around the differences in the SQL implementations. That is, if the SQL syntax differs between the database engines, you will have to work around these differences in your code.