How do I use a database in C++?

Question

I've only really used phpMyAdmin and SQL calls from PHP to use a database before, and I want to use that same functionality in C++, but I'm not sure how to go about doing that. What is a good database system to use? Is there a good open source one available? What headers/functions do I need in order to connect to/use the database in C++? How is using databases in C++ different from using them in PHP?

Answer 1

SQLite is a good, simple, open source database that can be used in C/C++.

Answer 2

There is a template library called Oracle, Odbc and DB2-CLI Template Library that allows to use different databases from C++.

Answer 3

There is a project on codeproject for this. It is a really nice wrapper class for working with databases.

Also if you only need simple database usage, as mentioned above I would suggest sqlite.

Answer 4

There are many libraries out there. For a MySQL client, there's the MySQL C Api and MySQL++.

Answer 5

Although it's got a couple of quirks SOCI is one of the nicer C++ database abstractions around.

It allows connections to Oracle, MySql and Postgres databases. It also has unsupported backends for SQLite, ODBC and Firebird. We use SQLite and it works well.

A trivial snippet from the docs:

int id = ...;
string name;
int salary;

sql << "select name, salary from persons where id = " << id, 
    into(name), into(salary);

It also plays well with standard library iterators (easy to fill containers with SQL results) and - optionally - some of the Boost types (optional, tuple, date-time fusion::vector).

Answer 6

I've used MySQL++ for my web servers written in c++ . When I need something which will be used on desktop , I use SQLlite , because it's a great replacement for ofstream and fopen , and it's fast .

What SQL lite actually enables you to do , is to use SQL langauge on a top of a local file, i.e. there is no database server etc. , only the library which mimics the SQL .

I know that Skype uses SQLlite to manage it's data .

On the other hand , if you need something to connect to MySQL , for your example, you write a Web Server app in C++ , you should use MySQL++ , because it's so great :)

Answer 7

Postgresql comes with the libqxx library, which is pretty good (although documentation is sometimes a bit sparse):

• Modern C++ design
• Supports all the features available in Postgres out of the box (for comparison, getting bulk copy to work in OleDB was quite a nightmare)
• Cool features, such as automatic retry in case of disconnections
• Available in the package managers of many *nixes