Re: Octave and Database connectivity

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 12 September 2012 06:49, ahowe42 <address@hidden> wrote:
> For various reasons - including that I have much more expertise and existing
> matlab/octave code to use - I must stick with Octave.

I really recommend once more to use another language. Octave and
Matlab are both essentially glorified wrappers over 30-year-old
Fortran libraries and ill-suited for the programming needs of today.
They are both awful general-purpose languages. Yes, people use these
two languages to write web servers and email clients, but it's really
a case of a square peg in a round hole. They do one thing and one
thing oly well, and that is array-oriented numerical computation.
Everything else about these two is unpleasant:

    http://abandonmatlab.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/hello-world/

The proliferation of Matlab for tasks it is not well suited for arises
from people knowing only one language and deeming themselves unable to
learn anything else. I encourage you to not be afraid to learn
something new and try Python.

> I don't have any familiarity with database access through Python or
> Java, but the Java implementation seems likely to be more efficient,
> since I don't have to put a layer on top of Octave.

Oh, Java is an efficient layer? I suppose you have forgotten what it's
like to wait for a jvm to boot up? Ever wondered why LibreOffice takes
so long to start? ;-)

> Does anyone have example code for running SQL queries against MySQL
> using the Java package?

Using the Java package will be essentially the same as using Pytave.
It's just another glue package between two languages. You'll have to
learn Java and whatever Java tools there are for talking to databases,
e.g. JDBC.

There is a database package in OF, but I'm willing to bet it's
suffering bitrot:

    http://octave.sourceforge.net/database/index.html

If you do get it to work, let us know.

HTH,
- Jordi G. H.