Connecting to DBMS server via iOS

I have to connect to a RDBMS (loca开发者_开发百科lly and remotely) via iOS. I have seen the solution ( http://odbcrouter.com/ipad), but for that we have to buy a server side program to run but its very expensive and not a mangeable solution as we have to buy it for more than 1000 stores and making updates etc for each store will be very difficult.

I have just checkout the following iOS app ( http://www.impathic.com/impathic/index.html), it is doing the same thing without any server side code, which make me think that, there will be a way to do this without any server side code... So I was wondering if these RDBMS expose themselves the way I am expecting.

Thanks.

That impathic program is very interesting, but they're likely using a 3rd party library.

The RDBMS wire protocols aren't common, and typically only ODBC and JDBC drivers have implementations of them (and the actual native drivers of course).

If your database is Postgres or MySQL (or some other OSS DB) you may well be able to simply port the native drivers source code to iOS and build it for ARM. I've not done it, but it might work. I don't know if any of the other DBs have ARM native drivers for iOS or note.

Otherwise, you would likely be better off with a middleware solution, depending on what kind of work you plan on doing. Webservices are pretty straight forward for basic cases.