SPUG: Meeting REMINDER -- Hello Perl & DBD::mysql - 19 October 2004 (fwd)

Andrew Sweger andrew at sweger.net
Mon Oct 18 15:34:18 CDT 2004


Tomorrow night at Amazon.com's Pac-Med building. Would anyone care to
write some sensible directions to the building and post to the list. I'll
get it on the website if someone would do that please. Thanks!


             October Seattle Perl Users Group (SPUG) Meeting
             ===============================================
  
       Title: Hello, Perl
     Speaker: C.J. Collier

          and

       Title: How DBD::mysql Enhancements Can Benefit the Perl Developer
     Speaker: Patrick Galbraith

Meeting Date: Tuesday, October 19, 2004 
Meeting Time: 7:00 - 9:00 p.m. (networking 6:30 - 7:00)
    Location: Amazon.com Pac-Med Building
              
        Cost: Admission is free and open to the general public
        Info: http://seattleperl.com/

             ===========================================

It's a month of excellence for SPUG once again. Many, many thanks to C.J.
Collier for engineering and fine tuning what should make for a excellent
SPUG meeting this month. C.J. had an excellent speaker all lined up for us
which fell apart at the last minute (through no one's fault) and he went
and found someone no less excellent: Patrick Galbraith of MySQL. I
mentioned to C.J. that it would be great if we could also get a talk in
aimed at folks wanting to get into the Perl game without drowning in
obscure details and religious wars. The next thing I knew, C.J. was
volunteering to provide an introduction to this most excellent programming
language. And to top it all off, C.J. has also arranged for us to meet in
the most excellent A/V meeting room at Amazon.com's Pac Med building. See
the presentation details below.

I am not providing directions to the meeting location in this email. It
was more important to get the announcement out (since I'm already late in
doing so). Someone will post this information separately.

If you want to exchange PGP/GnuPG signatures, please contact me directly
with your public key (now!) and I'll bring fingerprint checklists for
participants. Contact me if you want to know more.

What's with seattleperl.org and seattleperl.net? The registrar failed to
complete a renewal (they happily took my money however) and the entries
got pulled from the TLD's. It's being fixed along with many other things
that are broken thanks to me.

Excellent. (Okay, that should be the last time I use that word today.)

Here's what's in store for you at our next meeting:

Hello, Perl
===========

About C.J. Collier:
-------------------

Owner and operator of Collier Technologies.  He is currently working with
Amazon's Enterprise Commerce Services to build the next generation of
E-commerce infrastructure.  C.J. has been using Perl since 1998 for tasks
including daily system administration, building test automation
infrastructure and desktop application programming.

About the Presentation
----------------------

C.J. will guide beginners through their first iterations of Hello World,
exploring Perl syntax, scalars, lists and basic list operators.  Please
bring a laptop if you want to participate in this portion of the meeting.  
Sitting next to an experienced Perl guru will likely help as well.

   ================================================================


How DBD::mysql Enhancements Can Benefit the Perl Developer
==========================================================

About Patrick Galbraith:
------------------------

Patrick Galbraith is a Senior Systems Engineer with MySQL AB. He has been
enjoying Perl and open source software since 1994 and has been lucky
enough to pay his bills doing so!

 - Launched East Side Journal's website (now Kingcountyjournal) in 1996
 - Worked for the Cobalt Group from 1997-1999
 - Worked for OSDN on Slashcode/slashdot.org from 1999 to 2002 (now OSTG)
 - Other stints - Classmates.com, TMobile
 - currently Senior Software/Engineer at MySQL AB where he works on 
   DBD::mysql, build tools, and most recently the MySQL Federated Storage
   Handler

About the Presentations
-----------------------

MySQL, until version 4.1, didn't have server-side prepare statements in
the C API (which DBD::mysql uses). With the current version of DBD::mysql,
prepare statements with placeholders are emulated by simple string
replacement, and results in having none of the benefits of using 'prepare'
with placeholders, so many perl developers haven't really utilized the
benefit of using placeholders in SQL such as with:

    my $val1 = 1;
    my $val2 = 'Test value';
    my $sth = $dbh->prepare("INSERT INTO testtable VALUES (?, ?)");

    $dbh->execute($val1, $val2);

Now that MySQL version 4.1 and later versions are available, it is
possible to perform server side prepare statements in the C API, which
results in much better performance. DBD::mysql will soon (if not now) have
this functionality, which will give Perl developers the ability to use
server side prepare statements, which in turn will give them better
performance.

Patrick will show the Perl developer briefly how this was accomplished in
the driver code. Also, he will show them how to write applications that
take advantage of this new functionality, such as how they can prepare a
single SQL insert statement and simply pass the values they wish for their
application to insert by simply calling 'execute' as in the previous
example. He will detail how their application can benefit from this, and
how it will result in fewer database calls, using a mod_perl
database-driven web application as an example.

He will also discuss future ideas for DBD::mysql, such as named
placeholders and cursors.

   ================================================================

Okay, what did I forget this time?

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