Spent most of today reading through the various websites for for C++ wrappers of SQL databases. The best ones, in my opinion, are the official ones: mysql++ and libpqxx (was libpq++, but official now (2025) is libpqxx). Unfortunately, these are both tied strictly to their specific databases and are not database independent.
Also in the mix are DBConnect and GQL. Both are rather pointer-happy, but at least DBConnect encourages use of it's own smart pointer to avoid copious use of delete. On the plus side, they are database-independent.
Only mysql++ has the SSQLS feature. What is that you ask? It is a mechanism whereby you can easily create structures that mirror your database tables, and then go around using them as members of container objects, and doing things like:
query.insert(row_data);
This makes the library code extremely hairy (so hairy that it motivated a fork of the code a few years ago), but gives the advantage of enabling the compiler to check your field names, localizing your C++-to-SQL linkage in one place, and letting the library take care of generating properly escaped SQL code.
So far, my research confirms that the free software community still lacks a proper database independent C++ SQL library that shields the programmer as much as possible from quoting issues. As always, please email me if you know better.
Cool Program of the Day
Unpaste is a program by Jeroen Vermeulen that attempts to find repeated code in your C, C++, and Java programs. It is a work in progress, but already useful. It scans all the files you give it, and detects duplication even with name changes or differences in const.
[Edited to fix and remove broken links]
