Abstract
SqueakDBX is a database driver which allows users to perform relational database operations (DDL, DML and SQL) through a truly open source library. To achieve this, it uses the OpenDBX library (http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/OpenDBX). Through this project, the Squeak and Pharo community is able to interact with major database engines such as Oracle and SQL Server, in addition to those which are open source, like PostgreSQL, MySQL or Sqlite.
Moreover, integrating SqueakDBX with GLORP (http://www.glorp.org/), will allow users to generate a complete and open source solution to relational database access.
There are several approaches to persist in Squeak. Some of them are very interesting such us OODB (Gemstone or Magma), image persistency, CouchDB or TokyoT/C, GOODS, among others. However, all of these options only make sense if you can actually be the one that decides the way you will persist your objects, but it's not something that happens often, frequently, the client (the one that pays for the software), asks you to use, not only a particular persistence strategy (RDBMS), but also a particular database (Oracle, MS SQL, etc.). There are a lot of reasons for this: the clients already have licenses, they have the support of a well known company for their products, they know SQL, they want to query, they have legacy systems, etc. The problem is that Squeak only provides drivers for MySQL and PostgreSQL, so... what would you do in the rest of the cases? Change to another language? SqueakDBX is the solution to this as it allows you to develop most of your systems in Squeak.
Our team members are: Hernán Cassinelli, Germán Palacios, Esteban Lorenzano and Mariano Martínez Peck
Bio
My name is Mariano Martínez Peck. I live in Buenos Aires, Argentina and I am a Systems Engineer. I got my degree at Facultad Regional Buenos Aires of Universidad Tecnológica Nacional. I have been working in Smalltalk for two years, starting with the development of SqueakDBX. At this moment, I am working in a finnancial company using Visual Age Smalltalk . However, for my personal projects, I prefer using Squeak and Pharo.
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