zSQLgate provides an Z39.50 interface to your relational databases. That is, it provides a generic gateway between the Z39.50 Information Retrieval protocol and any pretty much any relational database you care to mention.
The Z39.50 information retrieval protocol (now ratified as international standard ISO 23950) is a mature and powerful protocol used in diverse application domains including:
It's particularly useful in distributed systems that need to provide uniform access to a variety of different information resources, and has therefore provided the technical backbone of many European and international collaborative projects.
Z39.50 and relational databases may seem to belong to separate universes, but in practice they often they need to play nicely together. Many, perhaps most, Z39.50 servers are built on top of relational databases; and many IR projects need to add Z39.50 interfaces to existing relational databases.
This has traditionally been an awkward and error-prone process, as most of the available tools are rather low-level, and require extensive programming. zSQLgate aims to change that by providing a generic Z39.50-to-relational-database gateway - a Z39.50 server which serves the data from a relational database. Instead of requiring programming, setting it up is a matter of writing a relatively straightforward configuration file, as briefly described in the tutorial.
... Another satisfied customer ...
Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 15:06:09 -0800
From: Chaim Peter Chester <peteris@designis.info>All we really had to do was write the config file. I wrote and tested the entire config file myself in one afternoon! I could test it and see exactly how the config translated into a query. I love it when things just work!
Please be aware that zSQLgate is not Free Software (although the licence is fairly permissive). See the licence for details.
There are four main area in this website:
The zSQLgate distribution itself. This may be freely downloaded for evaluation purposes, although a licence must be purchased if the software is to be deployed.
The HTML form of the documentation supplied with the zSQLgate distribution.
Some war-stories about deployments of zSQLgate in the real world.
Information about the various levels of support, both informal and commercial, that are available.
For a quick start, you could do much worse than getting a flavour of how zSQLgate works by ploughing straight into the tutorial.
Feedback to
<mike@sql.z3950.org>
is welcome!