Building a database interface in Emacs

[Mathias Dahl <brakjoller@gmail.com>]

I have been looking into using Emacs for doing queries etc against an
Oracle database, for certain work purposes. I use the nice functions
in sql.el (M-x sql-oracle in my case) for doing ad-hoc queries and
such, but I want to build some small forms or similar to process
certain data, with the intent of replacing some of the boring and
heavy GUI apps we have.

At first I just want to see if it is possible to do, by making up some
simple form to browse records or similar.

What would be the best approach for doing this? First I tried adding
something on top of sql.el and comint.el but it seemed overkill as I
am not interested in a command line interface. My current plan is to
use `start-process' to start sqlplus in a process, and to send input
and parse the output I get back from that process.

Is there any smarter way of doing it?

I want to do this on w32, btw.

/Mathias