Database Interfaces

As you’ve already read, SQL is fairly standardized. Most of the SQL statements you write will work with any relational database. However, there’s another layer of communication that I haven’t yet discussed. SQL is what you use to issue commands to a database, but the next question you have to answer is how to connect to the database with your program so that you can issue those SQL statements and retrieve the results. All databases provide a native interface of some kind that you can use to communicate with the database. Unfortunately, those interfaces are proprietary. A program that is written specifically to communicate with an Oracle database will be totally unable to issue SQL statements to a MySQL database. Fortunately, ...

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