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

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.

I have a Humax Foxsat HD Satellite Receiver I use in the UK.

I saw on channel 999 and at BBC Iplayer on Freesat that the BBC Iplayer is available on beta to humax users with a broadband connection. As a previous Virgin/NTL subscriber the one thing my wife and I miss is being able to watch the IPlayer on the television so this sounded great. The problem is my router is a good distance away from the television but I have a wireless router plugged into the back of a cisco plugged into the back of my NTL modem so wireless seemed just the trick.

For various reasons I won't go in to here I needed finer granularity in the Last-Modified and If-Modified-Since HTTPD headers for a project I am working on. Since Linux 2.5.48 the file modification time has a granularity of nanoseconds - here is the quote from the man page:

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.

I've had a laptop stolen! It was a long time ago, I'd paid thousands for it (over £3000, it was a long time ago when laptops were a lot more expensive than now) and I was gutted. To make matters worse I'd not put a BIOS password on it and also this is when I discovered my mis-sold insurance policy only covered £1200. Thank you Skipton Building Society - not. I took it in to work to show a colleague Linux on it and made the mistake of leaving it in my bosses car whilst we went for a drink before going home. Someone got in to the underground car park, broke the window and made off with it - thief - sorry for your window boss. If I'd installed a BIOS password then at least I would have had the small comfort that although not impossible to get around, it would have made matters difficult.

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.

In this example for Linux we will install the unixODBC driver manager and an ODBC Driver and get data back from Microsoft SQL Server. We are ignoring access from any particular programming language or interface and just use the isql utility that comes with unixODBC but for further information about access from PHP, Perl, Python etc see
Easysoft development.

You will need to know:

1. the name or IP address of the machine where MS SQL Server is installed.