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THE META-HTML LANGUAGE REFERENCE MANUAL

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Short Description:	With the plethora of ANSI SQL compatible databases present on the marketplace, <Meta-HTML> provides a single comprehensive interface which may be used to access any of those which are supported. Such databases include <code>mSQL</code>, <code>mySQL</code>, <code>Oracle</code>, <code>SyBase</code>, <code>Informix</code>, and many other ODBC compliant databases. Using the <Meta-HTML> Generic SQL Interface (GSQL), you can more rapidly develop and inexpensively prototype your application -- then migrate to full-blown production scale without writing a single line of code! For example, you might build an in-house HR application using the MySQL database. Once you are happy with the application flow and GUI, you can port the application to Oracle 8i by changing two lines of code: <example> <sql::set-database-type mysql> <set-var app::dsn = "host=localhost;database=hr"> ... <sql::set-database-type odbc> <set-var app::dsn = "HOST=production;database=HR;SVT=Oracle 8i;..."> </example>
Long Description:	The <Meta-HTML> Generic SQL Interface works by providing all of the underlying functionality for each specific database type at a generic top-level interface which never has to change. You specify which type of database that you would like to use with a single function call, using <funref generic-sql-interface sql::set-database-type>. Although there are specific low-level functions implementing the database connectivity, the higher-level routines transparently make extremely efficient use of them to handle your requests. Because the low-level functions exist, you can easily write code which copies data from one type of database (say mSQL) to another type (say an Oracle ODBC database).