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

DBD::ODBC has had increasing support for unicode since version 1.16. However, unicode seems to be an issue that causes a lot of confusion and especially when it comes to DBI and DBDs. The mantra of just DWIM, is complicated because most DBDs were originally written with no unicode support.

I've heard people mention travis-ci but not really paid much attention to it, that is, until yesterday when I issued a pull request from my github account for a few minor fixes to DBI. I wondered if my pull request was applied and took a quick look at DBI on github to see my pull request was still pending. Clicking on my pull request I see a "All is well — The Travis CI build passed" and just clicked on it.

After being forced to drop the subversion repository used by DBD::ODBC as perl.org has dropped subversion I moved it to github. Then, my friends working on DBI related modules setup up perl5-dbi and Merijn (Tux) helpfully moved DBD::ODBC under that umbrealla for me - thanks Tux.

I spent a small amount of time debugging a problem in a script I was modifying this morning as a while loop with each seemed to loop forever:

I've just uploaded DBD::ODBC 1.44_1 to the CPAN. This is the first release since the enforced move away from subversion on perl.org (not that this is a complaint). Hopefully, with DBD::ODBC being on github now I might get a bit more in the way of contributions.

There are a couple of bugs fixed but unless you reported them I'd be surprised if you are affected by them but all testing is welcome.

• Changes in DBD::ODBC 1.43 March 6 2013

This is a full release of all the 1.42_* development releases.

plus:

• [Bug FIXES]

Minor fix to 10handler.t test suite which relied on a native error being true instead of defined.

• Changes in DBD::ODBC 1.42_5 January 25 2013
• [BUG FIXES]

Not all modules used in test code were specified in build_requires.

• Changes in DBD::ODBC 1.42_4 January 21 2013
• [ENHANCEMENTS]

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: