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Until recently it has been difficult to insert unicode characters above 0xFFFF into MS SQL Server. DBD::ODBC could do it in such a way that you can select them back correctly but the built in functions (like length, sorting and upper/lower etc) did not treat the surrogate pairs as such so it was limited.

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 introduces a new collation suffix (_SC) and it supports surrogate pairs (although there is an indication that the UTF-16 encoded data must be sent little endian and I've not managed to test on a big endian machine as yet). Here is some test code:

I have released a new development release of Perl DBD::ODBC. This contains some important bug fixes and changes so I strongly advise you to test this out.

There was a problem introduced in the test suite in 1.40_2 when run to non MS SQL Server which results in a few tests failing because done_testing is called twice (please ignore this - it is fixed in subversion trunk).

I got my Raspberry Pi a week ago and wrote up my first impressions about the RP and whether it would work to get our children programming at Raspberry Pi - will it get our children programming? and if so why not in Perl?.

Since then I wanted to get DBI and DBD::ODBC installed and install an ODBC Driver.

I've just sent to the CPAN the 1.39 release of DBD::ODBC. This contains some bug fixes, one major enhancement to support TAF and one change in behaviour you should note.

I'm sat in my study writing this on my new Raspberry Pi - how cool is that? It arrived yesterday from Farnell from whom I preordered it nearly 6 months ago. Bare with me as I'll get to the Raspberry Pi and Perl but first some observations on what got me into programming.

What got me into programming
So what has all this got to do with the Raspberry Pi?
Some Raspberry Pi observations
Is Perl taking advantage of the Raspberry Pi?
In Conclusion

Yanick and I have been trying to keep on top of DBD::Oracle RTs but the time I have to do this is short. There are also some issues I don't feel in a position to investigate. There are 35 outstanding RTs which is a significant improvement on 2 years ago when it was over 50 but that is still a depressing number in my mind.

A week ago one of our air conditioning systems blew up and took the others out with it. Temperatures quickly rose and before long nagios spotted a machine had gone down. Nothing really bad had happened at this point but when we could not get the air conditioning back online we had to temporarily turn off some non essential systems to keep the heat down. Could we have spotted this earlier?

I originally bought a OCZ Vertex2 60Gb SSD for my new machine (over a year a go, possibly more). It usually runs at around 40-45Gb used in Windows depending on what I've got in my documents folder. I felt things were slowing down and after downloading smartmontools and gsmartcontrol I realised my SSD firmware was way out of date (v1.11) and 1.37 was available.

Mostly due to the thread in dbi-dev at DBD::ODBC fetch is returning string for integer (unfortunately some of it was off list) and further comments and rt at Changes in binding columns in DBD::ODBC and DiscardString with SQL_INTEGER not working properly I have made significant changes to the binding of columns in a result-set for DBD::ODBC.

I've never used the USB slot in my Foxsat HDR PVR but just recently I wanted to view some video (wmv files) created by Picassa on my television. The video was too big to put on the only handy USB stick I had but I had a 150Gb maxtor USB drive so I copied it on to that and plugged it in to the foxsat. Although the foxsat recognised a USB device was inserted it could not read it stating it needed to be ext3, FAT16 or FAT32.