# OTL 4.0, Introduction

# Introduction

This document describes the Oracle, Odbc and DB2-CLI Template Library, Version 4.0 (OTL 4.0). OTL 4.0 is a C++ library based on templates. It integrates all of the previous releases into one library.

OTL 4.0 was designed as a combination of a C++ template framework and OTL-adapters. The framework is a generic implementation of the concept of OTL streams. The OTL-adapters are thin wrappers around the database APIs and are used as class type parameters to be substituted into the template framework.

OTL 4.0 covers the functionality of a whole database API with just a handful of concrete classes: otl_stream, otl_connect, otl_exception, otl_long_string, and several template PL/SQL (Oracle) table container classes, generated from the template framework and the OTL-adapters.

The OTL code gets expanded into direct database API function calls, so it provides ultimate performance, reliability and thread safety in multi-processor environments as well as traditional batch programs. OTL 4.0, being a template library, is highly portable since it is self-sufficient and compact enough.

OTL 4.0 is ANSI C++ compliant (ANSI C++ typecasts, clean templatized code, etc.), tightly integrated with the Standard Template Library (STL) via so-called STL-compliant stream iterators, and natively supports the STL std::string's in otl_stream's.

The current version of the OTL supports Oracle 7 (natively via OCI7), Oracle 8 (natively via OCI8), Oracle 8i (natively via OCI8i), Oracle 9i (natively via OCI9i), Oracle 10g (natively via OCI10g), DB2 (natively via DB2 CLI), ODBC 3.x as well as ODBC 2.5 compliant data sources in MS Windows and Unix (e.g. Oracle, MS SQL Server, Sybase, Informix, MySQL, DB2, Interbase / Firebird, PostgreSQL, SQLite, SAP/DB, TimesTen, MS ACCESS, etc.). The list of supported database backends is constantly growing.

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Copyright © 1996, 2007, Sergei Kuchin, email: skuchin@ispwest.com, skuchin@gmail.com
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