martin-evans.me.uk Always finish the day on a success

It is often said don't optimize too early. I try very hard to keep to that, and I do mean very hard. In the project I am working on now we have a basically working implementation (although some functionality is still to code, it is on the edges - this probably counts as too early - oh dear). We have a rather complicated setup which I don't have the time to go into here but at its simplest it is the age old client-server relationship and involves a lot of database (Oracle via DBD::Oracle) access. The client in this case is really a daemon process receiving work to process and either processing it or passing it on to another server to be queued and worked on later.

David Gasson reported identifier quote wrong in DBIx::Log4perl. Since he identified the problem, provided working examples and even highlighted the change to fix the problem I applied it and released 0.16 immediately.

DBD::ODBC has a new rt from Bruce Tanner at Invalid precision value (SQL-HY104) with DBD-ODBC 1.23. Thanks Bruce, one of the few people who keep testing DBD::ODBC, I only wish there were more - see Help me.

I uploaded DBD::ODBC 1.22_3 to CPAN yesterday.

New rt for DBD::ODBC at DBD::ODBC - [Microsoft][SQL Server Native Client 10.0][SQL Server]The incoming tabular data stream (TDS) remote procedure call (RPC) protocol stream is incorrect. The SQL Server native client driver has proved to be a bit buggy and this /may/ be another one - we'll have to wait and see. DBD::ODBC already has a number of workarounds for issues in the MS SQL Server ODBC Driver and Native Client Driver.

Yesterday I was contacted by someone at Ingres with a patch to make DBD::ODBC support the ingresCLI driver manager. I'm always happy to accept these patches and with a moderate rewrite (necessitated by the fact I'd hacked Makefile.PL around a lot recently for 64bit support without checking it in) I managed to rewrite the patch. The changes are checked in to subversion now and are reported to work for Ingres. Unicode support is not there yet but I believe they are working on it.

I've been working on 1.22 doesn't compile on 64 bit systems with unixODBC on and off for a few days. Boy, this is tiresome (no reflection on the poster of this rt).

Today a long standing Easysoft customer upgraded from DBD::ODBC 1.13 to 1.21 and their scripts stopped working properly :-( It appears they use the ping method to detect whether the connection handle is connected to the database and since upgrading to 1.21 they are getting DBD::ODBC::db ping failed: Cannot allocate statement when disconnected from the database at ./xxx.pl line 11 when calling the ping method after a disconnect.

At Easysoft we have been using DBIx::Log4perl for some time to log DBI database access methods in a way that was useful to us. In fact, that is why I wrote DBIx::Log4perl in the first place.

I spend all day writing code so it is not unnatural that I blog about it too. I know drupal has code tags but they still end up changing < and > and most code is full of those. There seems to be loads of solutions but many of them have problems - use of code, pre and xmp tags (not all browsers do the same thing with xmp), substituting &#60; etc for < (too annoying, I wan to just paste my code in). Ginally I found the GeSHI filter and although it is not perfect it works better (by far) than any of the other solutions I've found.