1 Introduction

The value of RDMS for Prolog is often over-estimated, as Prolog itself can manage substantial amounts of data. Nevertheless a Prolog/RDMS interface provides advantages if data is already provided in an RDMS, data must be shared with other applications, there are strong persistency requirements or there is too much data to fit in memory.

The popularity of ODBC makes it possible to design a single foreign-language module that provides RDMS access for a wide variety of databases on a wide variety of platforms. The SWI-Prolog RDMS interface is closely modeled after the ODBC API. This API is rather low-level, but defaults and dynamic typing provided by Prolog give the user quite simple access to RDMS, while the interface provides the best possible performance given the RDMS independency constraint.

The Prolog community knows about various high-level connections between RDMS and Prolog. We envision these layered on top of the ODBC connection described here.