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

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.

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 read Stop running tests on install! and Perl marketing and CPAN module install tests with some horror. We should stop running tests by default! My initial thoughts were arguments against it.

Personally I find it rare for modules to fail tests but I'd still rather know something is possibly wrong than have it ignored (it is easier to deal with it at that point).

I devoted some time to try and reduce the massive DBD::Oracle rt list today. Some issues should be fixed now (see below) but in the mean time we have a number of stalled issues and some issues more than 1 year old and some more than 3 years old!

DBD::ODBC 1.36_2 is now on CPAN. I'm afraid this makes some incompatible changes with the last full release and for that I appologise. It seems I was just too ambitious defaulting the internal execute_for_fetch to on. I suspected some ODBC drivers would have bugs which prevented them from working but there are just too many actively used drivers for me to test them all and I hoped this would encourage fixes to them.

Yanick has just released a new development release of DBD::Oracle DBD-Oracle-1.43_00. As I mentioned in my blog a week or so ago, this release has a huge number of lines of code changed to remove the use of DBIS (see Changes to make DBIS more efficient and speeding up XS_DBI_dispatch()). This release removes the last few DBIS calls. As a result, if you are using a Perl built for threads (useithreads=define) this release is significantly faster than previous releases.

I've seen CPU usage nearly halved on fetches of large numbers of rows and I've had reports where people are doing lots of different selects for small numbers of rows of up to 10* quicker.

If you depend on DBD::Oracle you are strongly advised to try this version as this was over a 160K diff when I checked it in. If you notice anything broken please post an example to the dbi-users list.

A list of changes in this release is:

I have released DBD::ODBC 1.36-1 to cpan. With hindsight I was probably too ambitious releasing 1-35 with the default for execute_for_fetch enabled. This decision was based on a) my experience with writing bound arrays of parameters in the ODBC-ODBC Bridge b) I knew some drivers would have issues but I thought this might encourage fixes c) it is so much faster. As it turns out I am seeing issues currently with SQLite, Freetds, MS Access and even MS SQL Server.

I've uploaded Perl DBD::ODBC 1.35 to CPAN.

This is the culmination of 7 development releases in the 1.34 chain and is a significant release containing a lot of changes and enhancements. As always I would like to thank everyone who has helped and especially CPAN testers. The full list of changes since the last official release is below.

My intention is to release this as 1.35 in the next week so if you find any issues please let me know soon.

=head2 Changes in DBD::ODBC 1.34_5 February 17 2012

[BUG FIXES]

* The 40UnicodeRoundTrip tests counts could be 1 off in some cases.

* Fix for t/03batt.t which could fail a test if the data source had
no table - Kenichi Ishigaki

* If a driver misbehaves during global destruction e.g. SQLFreeStmt
fails but no error is available DBD::ODBC issues an error saying
an error occurred but no error diagnostics could be found. This is