Hello everybody,

It has been a long time before my last post. Many things happened: I had a great time in ECL2013, I wrote a code generator for JSCL, exams in the university… and suffering the heat at home in Spain, of course.

These days, at work, I am migrating our old SQL Server to PostgreSQL. We used to use CLSQL to access to the server from Lisp-side, but in a very straightforward way. We built everything on query. Although CLSQL is a big monster, it misses parametric queries, and you have to escape arguments yourself. Indeed, it was not as much stable as I would like. But let apart exotic features.

Therefore I gave a try to other libraries. The obvious choice would be Postmodern, but it failed soon. DAO capabilities seem incomplete and, I think, they should be other library, but I can live ignoring it. However, have a look to query: it has a strange arg/format mix and it is a macro! It means you will fail to build simple abstractions on it.

Fortunately, Postmodern’s author created a lower library cl-postgres, which I can suit easily:

(defun query (query &rest args)
  (cl-postgres:prepare-query *database* "" query)
  (cl-postgres:exec-prepared *database* "" args 'cl-postgres:list-row-reader))

but of course I will have to write connection pooling and other features myself, or perhaps mix postmodern and cl-postgres carefully.

In conclusion, I think we should be a little bit more conventional in the abstractions we build, and not to forget intermediate abstractions.