9 Application Programming Interfaces

MonetDB comes with a complete set of programming libraries. Their basis is the MonetDB application programming interface (Mapi), which describes the protocol understood by the server. The Perl, PHP, and Python libraries are mostly wrappers around the Mapi routines.

The programming interface is based on a client-server architecture, where the client program connects to a server using a TCP/IP connection to exchange commands and receives answers. The underlying protocol uses plain UTF-8 data for ease of use and debugging. This leads to publicly visible information exchange over a network, which may be undesirable. Therefore, a private and secure channel can be set up with the Secure Socket Layer functionality.

A more tightly connection between application logic and database server is described in Embedded Server.

• The Mapi Library
• The Perl Library
• The PHP Library
• The Python Library
• The JDBC Library
• The ODBC Library