Recently, I started looking for a simple C/C++ database abstraction layer with a nice and simple API. The best I came across was libdbi.

I wanted something that did the following,

• PostgreSQL and MySQL support – because those are the 2 main databases we use at work.
• Transaction and Savepoint support.
• Support for non-blocking async calls.
• Support prepared statements.
• Do all this in a fast and simple fashion.

Unfortunately libdbi did not have some features such as support for prepared statements and support for asynchronous access. Coming from years of Perl development, I expected something along the lines of DBI and was disappointed.

I wanted to try writing something over the next weekend to see if I could come up with something simple and fast that works with PostgreSQL and MySQL.

After a few weeks of toying around, I ended up with dbic++. What started as a learning exercise ended up becoming a pet project that started to look better than many of the existing open source libraries. It also ended up outperforming most of them.

I will be releasing the code sometime next week – on github, most likely. I’ll post a link. Meanwhile here’s an example that provides a brief glimpse of the API.

#include "dbic++.h"
#include <unistd.h>

using namespace std;
using namespace dbi;

int main() {

    // Handle h ("driver", "user", "password", "database", "host", "port");
    Handle h ("postgresql", getlogin(), "", "dbicpp");

    Statement st (h, "SELECT id, name, email FROM users WHERE id >= ? AND id < ?");

    // bind and execute the statement.
    st % 1L, 10L;
    st.execute();

    ResultRow r;
    while (r = st.fetchRow())
        cout << r.join("\t") << endl;

    // or you can do
    st.rewind();
    ResultRowHash rh; 
    while (rh = st.fetchRowHash())
        cout << rh["id"]    << "\t"
             << rh["name"]  << "\t"
             << rh["email"] << endl;

    st.finish();
}