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

I have released 1.22 of DBD::ODBC to CPAN today. This includes a fix to a serious problem with a unicode-enabled DBD::ODBC (the default on Windows) and the transfer of character fields between the database and Perl of greater than 64K characters. If this affects you then you should upgrade immediately. See the announcement on the dbi-users/dbi-dev or dbi-announce lists. This release also fixes a problem with inserting NULL into nvarchar fields in a unicode-enabled DBD::ODBC.

Ok, I'm new to drupal but I set up an email action to email me and associated it with a new comment. Then I added a comment as someone else and no email arrived. Then I found Using Drupal's email address in the mail.inc main function with -f which seemed to suggest the from address must be set if you are on fasthosts. Anyway the patch provided to mail.inc worked just fine. I include it here, partly as a reminder to me that I made this change:

Just spent a few hours trying to find out why the RowCacheSize attribute in DBD::Oracle does not seem to have any affect at all. The following code demonstrates the problem:

Fixed bug referred to in rt 46597 reported by taioba and identified by Tim Bunce. In Calls to bind_param for a given statement handle if you specify a SQL type to bind as this should be "sticky" for that parameter. That means if you do: $sth->bind_param(1, $param, DBI::SQL_LONGVARCHAR) and follow it up with execute calls that also specify the parameter: $sth->execute("a param"); then the parameter should stick with the SQL_LONGVARCHAR type and not revert to the default parameter type. The DBI docs (in subversion now)

I frequent perl monks a bit and late yesterday an issue came in with DBD::ODBC and Microsoft Access. The perl monks node and rt 46597 detail it all quite well. It appears DBD::ODBC was not following the DBI specification (as it was originally written) to the letter with respect to sticky bound parameter types but since then Tim Bunce has modified the DBI pod slightly to allow DBDs to enable a bound parameter to be rebound with a different type. The change to DBD::ODBC was fairly small but by the time I'd added a test case, bumped the version to 1.21_1 and tested a dozen or so ODBC drivers this consumed a fair amount of time.

Spent some time today trying to work out why the system I am working on was displaying unicode strings in errors double utf-8 encoded. Looks like a bug in DBD::Oracle. I posted the following example to dbi-users list:

Todays unicode problems are with JSON::XS. We are using JSON extensively in the project I am working on and we have a lot of unicode strings. JSON::XS really is the best and fastest perl JSON parser (I've tried them all) and Marc Lehmann who wrote JSON::XS is very knowledgeable and usually quick to respond to any query.

I have released 1.21 of DBD::ODBC to CPAN. You can find a list of changes here.

I have released 1.19 of DBD::ODBC to CPAN.

You can find a list of changes here.

This is my new site, an experiment in drupal.