Sql – Connecting to commercial databases from an Adobe AIR application

actionscript-3airapache-flexdb2sql server

I'm new to Flex and Adobe AIR, but I'm writing a desktop application that will need to connect and query commercial databases such as DB2, SQL Server and Oracle. How do I connect to these type of databases from ActionScript in an AIR application?

Best Answer

You really can't do it nicely, AIR is meant to use web servers as data sources not DBs, and there are no DB drivers in actionscript ready. That being said there are a few things that you can try:

  1. The usual way - you do not connect to a DB but ask a web server to do it for you, and return data
  2. Try this library - assql. It probably won't work very good, and it stopped being developed a year ago.
  3. With AIR 2.0 you can call native applications, so you could prepare an application that would do the queries for you and communicate with it. It will be rather complicated and if you're a beginner this probably makes no sense - and AIR 2.0 is still in beta. But you can even put a full blown Tomcat server inside an AIR 2.0 app, and after you do that you can use it like you would use a remote server. If you're interested read this post.

All in all, if you want to use DB-s as data sources AIR should probably not be your choice for a project.

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