Changes in DBD::ODBC 1.29 March 8, 2011

An official release of the 1.28 development releases.

[NOTE]

• The 1.28 development releases made a change which causes a generic error to be reported when an ODBC call fails but an error message is not retrieved from the ODBC Driver. It appears this has caught out a few ODBC drivers - notably freeTDS and Firebird. You now may see errors that were missed before e.g., DBIx::Class's tests for Firebird now errors test 21 "outer txn rolled back" (and others) because SQLRowCount returns an error after "ROLLBACK TO SAVEPOINT savepoint_0"; before this error was missed.

I'm about to release DBD::ODBC 1.29 after 4 development releases. Unfortunately, (as is often the case) I've found a bug just after the last development release related to batching of SQL statements and odbc_more_results. I'm fairly confident in it but if you use DBD::ODBC I'd love you to test it before I release it as it may be a while before I can release a new version.

You can find it here

I came across someone asking about DBIx::ProcedureCall today on Perl Monks in Execute Oracle Stored procedure using DBIx::ProcedureCall. Years ago I remember finding DBIx::ProcedureCall when we were about to embark on writing an application that used stored procedures in DB2, Oracle and MySQL. DBIx::ProcedureCall did not support DB2 and MySQL then and I was not that happy about the way it creates symbols in Perl for database procedures/functions so I dismissed it and I wrote my own code. When I saw it again on Perl Monks I thought I'd take another look at it and was surprised the supported DBDs has not increased (it is still Oracle and Postgres).

Recently at $work I've been battling with some Perl code which retrieves data from Oracle via DBD::Oracle and a package function which returns a reference cursor. As I've mentioned before in this blog, the user has no select privilege on the database but can call package procedures/functions which return reference cursors and hence data from the database.

The query we have a problem with attempts to return multiple rows but one column is actually a list of primary keys from another table:

I've been using DBD::Oracle for a fairly major application here for some time. Most of the code is actually in Oracle procedures but some remaining code is in Perl. Since we upgraded to Oracle 11Gr2 DBD::Oracle's 26exex_array.t test has always failed. I've not been too bothered about this since we don't use the execute_array method (implemented in DBI for most drivers but implemented in DBD::Oracle directly). However, testing has unearthed some worrying results.

I've just released DBD::ODBC 1.27. Version 1.27 combines all the 1.26 development releases and is a significant release as DBD::ODBC is now entirely ODBC 3.0 and requires an ODBC Driver Manager for any ODBC 2.0 drivers. Many thanks to everyone who has contributed. The changes are listed below. =head2 Changes in DBD::ODBC 1.27 December 29, 2010 Official release of the 1.26 development releases. =head2 Changes in DBD::ODBC 1.26_4 December 14, 2010

Once I'd familiarised myself with the Arduino development kit I wanted to try and use it to monitor my electricity usage. I know you can buy commercial devices which do this but I wanted more than the current usage; I wanted to log usage over time and I wanted to involve Perl somehow. I saw the Flukso ages ago and even tried to buy one but they were out of stock.

Just got back from my first visit to the London Perl Workshop. Thanks East Coast Railways for not only cancelling my train to London (and making me sit on the train at York station for an hour for nothing) but also for cancelling the one back from London. I'm ashamed to be English when people travelled to the workshop from out of this country in less time than it took me to travel 200 miles by train.

I thoroughly enjoyed the whole weekend. It was great to put some faces to the people I've had contact with on the Internet (in particular ribasushi, timb, tux) and the talks were most enlightning. I have to pickout some highlights for me although I obviously did not see all the talks:

I've recently uploaded a new experimental (and development) release of DBD::ODBC 1.26_1 to CPAN. This contains over 200 block code changes so it is a VERY significant change and should not be used on production servers until you have tested it. This release adds little in the way of functionality (and a few bug fixes) but is a major push to get DBD::ODBC truely ODBC 3.0 compliant and as such it will REQUIRE an ODBC driver manager to translate ODBC 3.0 calls to ODBC 2.0 if you are unlucky enough to have an ODBC 2.0 driver. I include the changes below but a few notes in addition:

Firstly, I should say I don't use Windows that much these days. The Windows machines where I test DBI and DBD::ODBC I set up ages ago with a Perl built with MS Developer Studio and I tend to keep them for that purpose. However, I bought a whole load of nice shiny new parts to build myself a new PC a month ago and installed Ubuntu and Windows as I thought I could get a more up to date Perl on Windows at home.