Improving DBI

Kirill

TSdbi implements a time series specific API on top of DBI. Some of my 
TSdbi packages use DBI in what you might consider the traditional way 
(TSMySQL, TSPostgreSQL, TSSQLite). TSodbc fudges a bit so it can use 
RODBC, doing some of what would be needed in RODBCDBI. But several of my 
packages interface to non-SQL databases and use only the DBI class 
definitions and a couple of essential generic methods (possibly just 
dbConnect and dbDisconnect). This includes packages TSsdmx, TSmisc, 
TSjson, TSfame, TSbbg, some on CRAN and some not. These packages 
interface to time series data from a variety of sources, many over the 
Internet. They all just wrap other packages in an attempt to standardize 
the API.

I think it would be nice if you can separate the DBI classes and the few 
essential generic methods into a different package from the more SQL 
specific parts of DBI. (I have taken this approach with my packages 
TSdbi and TSsql.)

To get a sense of how I use this in the non-SQL context you might look 
at package TSsdmx, in which the R code has

####### some kludges to make this look like DBI. ######
#for this require("DBI") ; require("RJSDMX")

setClass("sdmxDriver", contains=c("DBIDriver"))

setClass("sdmxConnection", contains=c("DBIConnection", "sdmxDriver"),
    slots=c(dbname="character") )

setMethod("dbConnect", signature(drv="sdmxDriver"),
      definition=function(drv, dbname, ...)
          new("sdmxConnection", dbname=dbname))

# this does nothing but prevent errors if it is called.
setMethod("dbDisconnect", signature(conn="sdmxConnection"),
      definition=function(conn,...) TRUE)

#######     end kludges   ######

Best of luck with your proposal and project.

Happy New Year,
Paul