At advogato.org, sarum wonders why there is no Simple SQL Protocol. What sarum wants is a simple way to pass SQL statement and dataset around in an implementation-language independant way. A way to do it would be to encapsulate the access to the database in an XML-RPC or SOAP server. A SQL statement, a database name, a username/password could be passed to a server who would "convert" this into a call using the database protocol native to the server and pass the result back to the client as a string with known delimiters between fields and records. It could allow any SOAP or XML-RPC capable language to fetch data from an M$ SQLServer whose capabilities would have been encapsulated and exposed by an XML-RPC or SOAP server. It could also let VS.NET access MySQL or Postgres running under Linux. I'll give it a try.
