[Qgis-developer] Native MS SQL 2008 Driver for QGIS

[Nathan Woodrow]

Hi all,

There has been some interest from a company here in Australia to develop a
MS SQL driver/provider for QGIS. IMO this is a good move as most
local governments, where I work and where I push my QGIS agenda, pretty much
all use MS SQL 2008 spatial for storing spatial data.  Having a driver for
MS SQL would make QGIS more attractive to these and many more Windows users.

The thing I wanted to find out was if implementing a native/provider MS SQL
Driver in QGIS would be the correct way to go about this.  At current there
is already a MS SQL driver for OGR, which can be used to open layer from the
database in QGIS using the Python console.  However there is no UI and while
OGR is fine with opening database connections it seems strange to use OGR
for some database engines but not others.

My thoughts were

Implement a native QGIS driver for MS SQL inheriting from
QgsVectorDataProvider

   - Less program layers as your not going though OGR then wrapping it in
   the QgsFeature class (should be faster).
   - Implement QBrowser support like what Giuseppe has done with his
   improvements to the postgis provider.
   - Closer control over the code eg faster bug fixing and features. Don't
   need to wait for OGR packages to be updated.

I guess something that came to mind is that we have a native provider for
PostGIS but yet OGR supports it.

In my mind a native driver is the way to go as we can integrate it more
tightly into the QGIS code base and not rely on an other library for bug
fixes and updates.

What are other peoples thoughts?

- NathanW
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