Universal database interface?

Here's an interesting proposition:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2005/04/11/rsdp.html

I don't particularly like the author's specific, proposed solution,
but there may be merit in having a common, vendor-neutral, transport
for SQL statements and result sets.

Consider, back in the day, ethernet was not the universal standard
that it is today. You couldn't count on a PC to have ethernet
built-in. Today, you *can* pretty much count on ethernet being there.
Likewise, I can remember when tcp-ip was not a given, but now you can
just count on having that as well. Is it so far out to hope for some
sort of universal database interface that one could just count on
having available on any PC just as we assume that ethernet and tcp-ip
will be available?

Obviously such an interface could not handle all the myriad
vendor-specific features that are out there, but surely one could be
designed that would cover most of the simple and common cases such as
firing off a query and getting results.

Well, read the article for yourselves. I'm interested in what others
think on this.

Best regards,

Jonathan Gennick --- Brighten the corner where you are
http://Gennick.com * 906.387.1698 * mailto:jonathan@xxxxxxxxxxx

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