libdbi Concepts and Terminology

Database Independent Abstraction Layer for C: libdbi Programmer's Guide
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# 1.2. libdbi Concepts and Terminology

In this guide, the terms "user" and "programmer" are used interchangably, since the target audience is the software developer using libdbi in his program. A star character (*) represents a wildcard matching any letters. For example, "dbi_conn_*" would represent all functions beginning with "dbi_conn_".

Before doing anything useful, your program must initialize libdbi. This creates an "instance" of libdbi which is accessible through a handle. The libdbi architecture provides several "drivers", one for each type of database server. All drivers are loaded into memory by each libdbi instance upon initialization and are made available to the programmer. Once a driver is instantiated, it represents a distinct database session and is called a "connection".

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