AirCERT Database Connectivity

0.2.0

Introduction

AirDBC is the AirCERT Database Connectivity abstraction layer for access to multiple RDBMS backends in C. It is designed for use in applications that run a large number of invocations of a relatively small number of statements; to that end, its API supports prepared statements only. It supports both positional and named binding of statement parameters, even on RDBMS backends which do not support named binding.

AirDBC ships with support for two RDBMS backends, PostgreSQL (http://www.postgresql.org) 8 via libpq and Oracle (http://www.oracle.com) 9i via the Oracle Call Interface. Applications may provide their own external drivers and register them at runtime, as well.

The client API is documented in airdbc.h, while the driver API is documented in airdbc_drv.h.

Downloading

AirDBC is distributed from http://aircert.sourceforge.net/airdbc

Download AirDBC 0.2.0 from sourceforge.net

Building

AirDBC uses a reasonably standard autotools-based build system. The customary build procedure (./configure && make && make install) should work in most environments.

AirDBC is linked against its built-in backend drivers at compile time. By default, no backend drivers are built. This is almost definitely not what you want, so you'll have to enable these using configure options. The following options are supported:

--with-postgresql[=prefix] builds the PostgreSQL driver
--with-oci builds the OCI driver (uses ORACLE_HOME environment variable)

Like many other NetSA products, AirDBC's configure script also supports the --with-glib-static option, which allows the use of a static libglib. This is useful in environments using ancient versions of glib (2.4 is common; AirDBC requires glib-2.6.4 or later) where a glib upgrade is not feasible. To use this, install glib-2.6.4 or later to a private prefix, then supply that prefix to --with-glib-static.

Copyright

AirDBC was developed at the CERT Network Situational Awareness Group by Brian Trammell <bht@cert.org> for use in the NAF tools.