> >I'm trying to decide on using DBI or an ODBC connection for moving data
> >into or out of MS ACCESS 97 (or 2000) and back into the ACCESS table
> >[yep, or change inside table].
> >
> >Given I need to perform all the usual extract and append, etc. tasks, do
> >any of you have suggestions or pointers on which to use ? Other life
> >lessons also appreciated ...
> If you are going to do any amount of database programming using Perl, I
> would use DBI, rather than finding some special-purpose ODBC module. The
> beauty if DBI is that no matter what the underlying interface is (ODBC,
> Oracle OCI, sockets) it looks the same from the application programmer's
> side of DBI.
[snip praises]
> Plus there's a really good DBI book out there. Take a look at it if you
> are jumping into a decent size database project.
I would second Sean's recommendation of DBI. It's very nice to use, with a
lot of nice neat tricks for doing things. The O'Reilly book is very helpful
(Programming the Perl DBI, by Alligator Descartes & Tim Bunce), although the
first few chapters are a bit basic if you've got a fair grasp of SQL and
databases. I've found it invaluable in my current job (working with an
Oracle database).
The big advantage is the reusability:
* if your database ever migrates to something a bit more meaty than Access,
you will have very little code to change
* if you want to write something similar for a different database, you will
have very little code to change
* instead of having to learn one set of stuff for ODBC on Windows, and then
learning a whole new set of stuff for anything different, you have one set
of stuff to learn which works with pretty much any database
Best wishes,
Rachel
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