malvasia bianca

I’ve finished working through the examples in that SQL book, I’ve read a JDBC tutorial, and I’ve downloaded a JDBC connector for MySQL. So I guess I don’t have any excuses not to start getting my fingers dirty. (I first typed “getting my features dirty”; I hope that isn’t a Freudian slip…) Next weekend is a three-day weekend; we’ll see what I get done then.

Good thing, too: just a week after finishing a book with no author, I’m about to start a book with three authors. And I currently can’t handle that, either, and I’d really rather not do so until after the SQL conversion.

JDBC seems straightforward enough. One weird thing: it has yet another iterator variant. This time, rather than leaving accessing, advancing, and querying validity as separate operations (as I prefer), or combining accessing and advancing, as Java traditionally does, it combines querying and advancing. Which is kind of strange – it means that your iterator starts out pointing before the first element, for example – but it does have the advantage that you can go through elements with a simple while loop. Also, it combines the iterator with the object pointed to, which actually isn’t so bad in this case: there’s no real reason to have a separate Result object outside of a ResultSet, I suppose.