SPUG: REMINDER February 2010 Seattle Perl Users Group (SPUG) Meeting

[Colin Meyer]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 08:35:53AM -0800, Michael R. Wolf wrote:
>
> On Feb 15, 2010, at 6:56 AM, Andrew Sweger wrote:
>
>> Remember, DBIx::Class at SPUG tomorrow evening. Details below...
>
> Currently using Class::DBI on a current project, I sure would be  
> interested in how folks might compare the two.  I don't think that  
> swapping one out for the other is appropriate, but knowing folks'  
> experience with both would help on future projects.

Class::DBI is old, crufty and un-maintained. There's a compatibility
plugin, DBIx::Class::CDBICompat, which will help you transition to
DBIx::Class. You'll still suffer some of CDBI's weaknesses, like all the
slowdown from lazy loading.

If you would like to use a Perl ORM, then DBIx::Class has the biggest
and most active community. Rose::DB is another reasonable choice. I
believe that it is faster than DBIC.

Personally, I waffle back and forth quite a bit on the overall
usefulness of ORMs. They make simple things very quick. But has anyone
used any ORMs that make the maintain complex queries easy? Writing and
maintaining complex queries in DBIC make me want to shoot myself. I find
myself desperately wishing for a domain specific language that's handily
designed for information retrieval from relational databases. Oh yeah,
there's this thing called SQL ...

I do like writing a complex query in SQL, and hiding that in a db view.
Then I can use DBIC for simple queries against the view, and get some
benefits, like paging, for making quick web based db reports. But then
try to make a report that rolls columns up together, or anything fancy,
and this simple scheme becomes unwieldy.

-Colin.