My two pennies; ** The name: I'd love to see boost::data_access / Boost.DataAccess. I would probably alias it to da. Rationale: SOCI seems to be entirely about accessing data. The Data can be arbitrary. It just makes sense to keep it as a generic term like DataAccess. DatabaseAccess implies that it works only against a physical database. Drawbacks: I can think of none. ** The connection string: My vote is to use a standard URI mechanism, like odbc://username:password@server/dsn or mysql://username:password@hostname/test, etc. Rationale: It's a standard well understood mechanism. Drawbacks: May be too limiting. You can generally append whatever named parameters you want as part of the query string: odbc://me:secret@localhost/gumball_shop?auto_commit=false&connection_pooling=true Things can get ugly pretty fast. That said I don't see why some sort of specialized builder for any backend couldn't be used to create the connection string. -- Scott Deming http://www.makefile.com