[Info-vax] Remote Data Access via File Share, ODBC (was: Re: Command Procedure Pipe output to a variable)

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 9/7/2021 4:40 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2021-09-07 17:58:10 +0000, Simon Clubley said:
> 
>> One final question: If DAP would be so wonderful to the world in 
>> general, then why isn't there a TCP/IP version of DAP ? (WebDAV 
>> doesn't really count IMHO unless it's moved on recently). There's a 
>> standardised TCP/IP version of every other application protocol.
> 
> The FAL/DAP analog is called ODBC, and the ODBC CLI API.
> 
> libferris (inactive) has the sorts of features that FAL/DAP might have 
> had added, after substantial new development work.  Or Plan 9, the Unix 
> analog to what DEC MICA was to OpenVMS, of course.
> 
> For those not needing ODBC or libferris or ilk, SMB and other shares 
> meet the requirements for many if not most users.
> 
> VSI could certainly provide an ODBC client within RMS and an ODBC server 
> akin to the DECnet FAL server. Or could route DAP over IP SSL/TLS if 
> they were inclined. (Though IP integration on OpenVMS is weak, and 
> SSL/TLS weaker.) Or the flexibility of something like the libferris 
> FUSE. Having an SMB client would be nice, as many sites have substantial 
> investments in SMB servers. But I digress.

ODBC is a relational database API and pretty far from
DECnet file access in my opinion. ODBC to an index-sequential
file makes sense and I believe that such exist. But the
data model for a sequential files does not match with ODBC.

If write access to a sequential file is needed then I think
alternatives would be SMB mount or NFS mount. Read access
could be provided by one of the common file download protocols.

Arne