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Changes in DBD::ODBC 1.42_2 December 17 2012

There is no need to upgrade to this version unless you are on a 64 bit platform where ints are 4 bytes and you update/delete/insert more than 2^31 rows and need the affected rows back.

Whilst at YAPC::EU 2012 (what a great conference BTW) a friend suggested I might change DBIx::Log4perl to DBIx::LogAny (where Log::Any did not exist when I wrote DBIx::Log4perl). DBIx::Log4perl came about when I was writing a large DBI based application and needed to know what was going on and realized the DBI tracing was far too detailed for us. DBIx::Log4perl logs at different levels DBI method calls and in particular everything it can find when an error occurs. Mostly all I needed was everything I could find when an error occurred but logging SQL passed to do and prepare and bound parameters etc was useful too.

I've just released Perl DBD::ODBC 1.42_0 development release.

There is no reason to upgrade unless you are using the MS Access ODBC Driver.

=head2 Changes in DBD::ODBC 1.42_0 November 28 2012

[BUG FIXES]

MS Access requires a longchar column to be bound using SQL_LONGVARCHAR.
However, MS Access does not support SQLDescribeParam and we default to
SQL_VARCHAR in this case. The point at which we switch to SQL_LONGVARCHAR
was defaulted to 4000 (for MS SQL Server). We now default to SQL_LONGVARCHAR
for MS Access when data is > 255. This means you can remove those

Whilst at YAPC::EU 2012 there was a talk which included Log::Any. I didn't attend that talk but a friend (Jens Rehsack) was and he wondered why DBIx::Log4perl wasn't DBIx::LogAny. The simple answer is that Log::Any did not exist when I wrote it and we were using Log::Log4perl.

I had plans for today but the weather was poor and so I thought I'd try a quick hack of DBIx::LogAny. You can find it here. There are 2 problems:

I've just uploaded the DBD::ODBC 1.40_3 development release to the CPAN. If all goes well this will be the official 1.41 release in a weeks time.

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