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

In the last few days whilst hanging out on the #dbi IRC channel I saw messages from someone using/developing OTRS (Open source Ticket Request System) with DBD::ODBC.

I know that not everyone is in to IRC and I for one have only flirted with it over the years but for the last 6 months or so I've frequented the #dbi channel and there are a number of knowledgeable and helpful people on it but there is a low representation from DBD authors/maintainers.

Sometimes something comes along that truly impresses me. get_iplayer is one of those things. As a UK resident who uses iplayer three or four times a week and a Perl fan get_iplayer really caught my interest. The idea that you can list all of the BBCs iplayer content then download whatever you like to watch whenever you like really did interest me. First I tried downloading it from github but it failed to find updates. Then I noticed it was available as an Ubuntu package and installed it. After that a:

I've just released v0.20 of DBIx::Log4perl. DBIx::Log4perl is a Perl extension for DBI to selectively log DBI methods, SQL, parameters, result-sets, transactions etc to a Log::Log4perl handle. This release fixes a problem where execute_array tuple status was reported at INFO level instead of DEBUG level and adds the DBIX_L4P_LOG_DELAYBINDPARAM constant which delays logging bind_param methods in DBI until the execute method is called.

Just hit a rather annoying problem in DBD::Oracle 1.24a today. Our application contains all the logic in database procedures and in some cases database result-sets are returned to our Perl code via a reference cursor. Due to problems with ora_auto_lobs not working on reference cursors in previous DBD::Oracle releases we generally use Data Interface for Lob Locators where ora_lob_length returns a lobs sie and ora_lob_read is used to retrieve it.

Recently I've had a spate of issues reported in dbi-users mailing list and direct to me wrt calling procedures in MS SQL Server. I thought it might be worth covering some of the more common ones here.

Recently I updated DBIx::Log4perl to handle DBI's clone method. This proved a little troublesome as clone is marked as "likely to change" and I'm not sure any other DBIx's have added clone. The problem I had was that clone does not call connect and all the code I had to add DBIX::Log4perl's attributes into the dbh was in connect.

Over the last few months I've been receiving an increasing number of emails from people experiencing problems inserting date/time/datetime/timestamp values into MS SQL Server specifically although not exclusively. There are a number of MS SQL Server ODBC drivers but the ones I see the most (in no particular order) are a) MS SQL Server ODBC Driver b) MS SQL Server Native Client driver c) Easysoft's SQL Server ODBC Driver and d) freeTDS. I hope to write a more expansive tutorial on this in the near future but until then I hope this blog post will help.

Yesterday I released DBIx::Log4perl 0.18 This principally add supports for DBI's clone method and fixes fetchrow_array ignoring calling context. It also adds a few speedups spotted using Devel::NYTProf, adds logging of connection attributes and fixes a few more minor issues.

Today I released a new development version of DBD::ODBC (1.23_2).

Apologies to the few people waiting on changes but I've been snowed under with work on DBIx::Log4perl, DBI and DBD::Oracle but mostly my day job (which uses all of these modules and a alot more).