Abstraction of ODBC for Nim. Example code:

import odbcn
let conn = newOdbcConn(";Server=127.0.0.1;UID=sa;PWD=mybadpassword;Database=testing")
discard conn.exec("insert into MyTable (MyIntCol, MyStrCol) values (?, ?)", 3, "Hello")
for row in conn.exec "select * from MyTable":
  assert row[0].toInt == 3
  assert $row["MyStrCol"] == "Hello"

Build status

Linux (x86_64)

Windows

No CI for Windows. If Linux CI works, Windows should work as well, because the Microsoft ODBC API is platform-independent. If Windows version of this library doesn't work, the C API wrapper is likely at fault.

Links

• Project page
• Repo

See the docs for in-depth manual to the various features and API reference.

If you encounter issues, please make sure you're registered at sr.ht, and submit a ticket by sending an email to ~mjaa/odbcn-nim@todo.sr.ht. Subscribe to this tracker by sending an email to ~/mjaa/odbcn-nim/subscribe@todo.sr.ht.

All contributions are done by means of git send-email. Send these to the mailing list at ~mjaa/odbcn-nim@lists.sr.ht. See CONTRIBUTING.md for details on this. Subscribe to the mailing list by sending an email to ~mjaa/odbcn-nim+subscribe@lists.sr.ht.

Read CONTRIBUTING.md for code guidelines. Testing is done by running inttests/odbc.nim. These integration tests are not run by CI; they must be run locally before pushing to master.

Conditional symbols

Add these Nim compiler flags to change odbcn behavior.

• -d:odbcNoEnvInit - disable initialization of global ODBC environment
  • In this case, this variable must be manually initialized, or the env argument must be given in every applicable odbcn proc
• -d:odbcEnvConnectionPooling - enable connection pooling for global ODBC environment

Alternatives to this library:

• std/db_odbc from Nim standard library
• coffeepots/odbc

Why choose this library over the above?

std/db_odbc is very minimal, and is made to integrate well with the other database abstractions by generalizing the API. odbcn aims to utilize the whole ODBC API, and as such doesn't try to generalize the API together with other DBMS APIs. This simplifies understanding of low-level details and optimizing access. At the cost of its minimal design, std/db_odbc lacks features such as connecting to a database server with a connection string. std/db_odbc is also unsafe in the case of database errors, because of inproper cleanup. This is the case for the fast* procs and iterators.

coffeepots/odbc is more complex than std/db_odbc, and solves the problems described above. What sets odbcn apart from that library is the design philosophy. odbcn utilizes Nim RAII with no ref types, while all handle types in coffeepots/odbc are ref types. The type system in odbcn emulates a subset of ODBC state transitions by representing a handle with several types, and having a handle instance transition between those types. This helps eliminate runtime bugs such as executing a query on a handle in a result set state.

"coffeepots/odbc" doesn't have a public API, because it is pre-1.0.0, and there hasn't been changes for over a year. This project also doesn't have a public API, but aims to do so soon.

Credit

"nanodbc" C++ ODBC abstraction helped in the following issues:

• Simple module design: all needed code goes in one module (private/core); extensions go into separate modules
• Knowing which SQL data types to support, because there are very many of these SQL data types
• Knowing which C data types to support
  • E.g. don't support "SQL_NUMERIC_STRUCT" for fixed-precision data types, because it is poorly designed in ODBC; just use use the "string" C data type instead

License

MIT

Versioning

This project follows SemVer 2.0.0. At the moment (pre-1.0.0), features and bug fixes increment patch version, and backwards-incompatible API changes increment minor version. If all goes well, I would like to bump to 1.0 at the start of 2023.

Todos

For 1.0 release:

• Reorganize and tidy integration tests in more specific suites
• Find as many bugs in the implementation as possible, and fix and make integration tests for them
• Document remaining functions in core.nim
• In odbcn/connstr, add support of {...} for attribute values, which is used to quote the value if it contains unsupported characters in ODBC
• Use openArray[char] instead of string for utf8To16 parameter
• Document or fix why the array fields in OdbcValue are hidden
• Make listDrivers and listDataSources use UTF-16 version?
  • Current implementation may get ANSI-encoded data, which is undesirable; must research this
• Rework OdbcException so that it contains OdbcError objects, and not just a string
• Restructure modules? (is private/core module appropriate?)
• Add toBytes(OdbcValue): seq[byte]
• Change newOdbcConn(s: string): OdbcConn to newOdbcConn(s: string): OdbcResult[OdbcConn]?
  • Motivation: This proc may be used to test if a connection is valid, so raising an exception is unnecessary
• Add requiresInit to all handle types (except OdbcEnv), because nil values are not allowed
• Add support for getData of result data into a non-object
  • Motivation: Easier to do queries that only contain 1 column
• Add warning if a field in typed next is unused? Maybe not
• Document that for static prep-variant, fields for typed next must correlate with the column name, else the column will not be read into a field
• Add UTF-8 encoding for varchar columns
• Add UTF-16 conversion for seq[char] values?
• Add tests for typed next(OdbcAnyResult, T) (and consequently typed items iterator)
• Split SQL Server-specific integration tests into its own file
  • Motivation: integration tests can be run with SQLite
  • This makes it easier to run integrations tests with CI, because the heavy SQL Server dependencies (docker, FreeTDS, SQL Server) are not required
• Add insert into abstraction, that makes it easier to construct the query
• Add tests for overloading bindCol, getData and bindParam procs in foreign modules
• Add tryExec* and tryConnect on OdbcConn so that exceptions are not raised when it is possible that the operation fails
• Somehow improve the stack traces - the large amount of templates and macros make it hard to inspect the stack trace
• Add support for Option[T] types
  • With bindParams the NULL value is bound
  • With getData, value is assigned none if ind == SQL_NULL_DATA, otherwise some with the value of SQLGetData
  • Do not support bindCols, because there's no place to store the ind pointer (indicating if the SQLFetch got a NULL value) between call to SQLBindCol and SQLFetch
  • Not supported as nonsensical: Option[seq[T]] (or option of any sequence-like type)
• Support SQL_NTS in SQLBindParameter for openArray[char] and openArray[Utf16Char]
  • openArray[char|Utf16Char] will always be regarded as zero-terminated
    • getData adds zero byte at end anyway
    • bindParam will assume there is a zero-byte to terminate the string
• today, bindParam puts a value into local scope, so it's not possible to bind parameters and then return from the user's proc and execute the query later with the bound parameters
  • must make sure the SqlLen_Or_IndPtr pointer is a safe pointer that doesn't go out of scope
  • add mode that checks at compile-time that bindParam doesn't insert any variables in scope
    • e.g. seq will always error here, since the len address can change on V2 since it is basically a fat pointer
    • e.g. string will error out becuase it creates a Utf16 string
• Fix setAttr so it uses SQLULEN/SQLLEN
• Make it possible not to unbind params in unbind, so that the same parameters can be reused, with something like execOnlyKeepParams, which takes no parameters (the user calls bindParams themselves)

Other tasks:

• Add std/times helper
• Add bindCols specialization for OdbcGenTyPreparedStmt with known column order
• Maybe provide a way to call dynamic version of prep to avoid code generation
• Add async-support (SQLCompleteAsync, etc.)
  • I don't know the scale of implementing async; I know async in Nim is very hard to extend at the moment, so this may be a futile effort
  • Will probably require existing structures to change
• Add ORM table insert abstraction (getting table schema and generating structures)
  • Possibly do this in a separate repo, to avoid bloat of features