Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am trying to use DBI to retrieve/update data from MS SQL Server and Win2000. To my dismay, the tables have numerous 8 byte binary data types (which contain data such as 0x02BE8B003DB14301) which don't seem to output at all when i do a simple select statement--perl outputs strange ascii characters. all the other columns that are not binary output fine. how would i get perl to handle this type of data correctly? michael

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Re: DBI and binary data type
by Juerd (Abbot) on Mar 14, 2002 at 19:42 UTC

    That (the 0x02BE... form) is just a textual representation for the actual data (the "stange" characters). To get it in Perl, you could use: 

    my $hexform = '0x' . unpack "H*", $binary;

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    HTH 

    U28geW91IGNhbiBhbGwgcm90MTMgY
W5kIHBhY2soKS4gQnV0IGRvIHlvdS
ByZWNvZ25pc2UgQmFzZTY0IHdoZW4
geW91IHNlZSBpdD8gIC0tIEp1ZXJk

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Re: DBI and binary data type
by mpeppler (Vicar) on Mar 14, 2002 at 20:48 UTC
    Which DBD driver are you using?

    Are the binary data items "timestamp" columns?

    Michael

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Re: DBI and binary data type
by Anonymous Monk on Mar 14, 2002 at 21:53 UTC
    thanks for your response juerd and mpeppler. i'm using DBD::ODBC. The unpack worked very nicely, but this leads me to another problem--how to perform an insert into a binary column with this retrieved binary number. i'm trying like this: 
    $ctsth = $ctdbh->prepare( "INSERT INTO table(ParentID,ChildID) VALUES 
+(?,?)" );

$ctsth->bind_param( 1, $hexform1, {TYPE => SQL_BINARY} );
$ctsth->bind_param( 2, $hexform2, {TYPE => SQL_BINARY} );
$ctsth->execute();

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    but the server keeps telling me that it can't implicitly convert a varchar to a binary and to use the SQL CONVERT function. i've tried using the CONVERT function in query analyzer and it gives me strange results 
    declare @var varchar(8)
set @var='0x02BE8B003DB14301'
select convert(binary(8), @var)

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    returns 0x3078303242453842 and not 0x02BE8B003DB14301. how can i insert this binary number? thanks, Michael
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