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

[Michael R. Wolf]

On Feb 15, 2010, at 11:19 AM, Colin Meyer wrote:

> Oh yeah,
> there's this thing called SQL ...

On a similar note, I found that, although it was convenient to have  
Perl callable "queries" that encapsulated that domain-specific  
language (that non-Perl language you SQL), the down side was that they  
*had* to be called from Perl.  I couldn't call them from the MySQL  
command line.  That became so annoying during analysis, testing, and  
debugging that I hacked together a piece of Perl that would allow me  
to call them from the command line.  I felt so proud to have invented  
something so much like the MySQL command line that could call Perl  
instead of SQL stored procedures.

Perhaps I should post my application as an add-on to Class::DBI and  
coin a new phrase into the Perl lexicon.  I could call these Perl  
thingies "stored procedures", and I could field my application with  
the name of mysql.  And I could reimplement all the commands of  
mysql's command-line interface....

Or I could add some kind of overloading to the existing mysql command- 
line interface that would access the Perl modules, strip out the Perl,  
and execute the SQL directly.

Or.... I could use stored procedures in SQL as they grew up in the DB  
ecosystem.

:-)

Summary:
     Good: Perl callable code with Perl semantics.  Great win for  
simple queries where the whole DBI genuflection is an overkill to  
retrieve one value.
     Bad: encapsulated SQL is no longer available to the SQL ecosystem  
of tools and design processes


-- 
Michael R. Wolf
     All mammals learn by playing!
         MichaelRWolf at att.net