Yipes. It's an intriquing concept and if your knowledge of regex and perl is far superior to your knowledge of SQL, then yes, you have a valid point. However, SQL can do a number of things easily that perl can't (well, CPAN-less perl can't, at least) like modify date/time structs without complex accountability for time & date rollovers.

Another thing you'd want to keep in mind is what size of database are you using? If you've got a database with <1000 rows this might be feasable. But your memory usage is going to increase quite a bit as your database size goes up as well, and when you get into large databases, well, let's just say that loading everything into physical RAM doesn't scale well, no matter how effecient the OS/interpreter/whathaveyou is.

Since you mentioned subselects though, Perl could come into play there.. Since some db's (*cough*mysql*cough*) don't support subselects you could use perl to generate your SQL statement. I can't begin to imagine the error checking that would go into this, however.

My $0.02 (and longest post to PM yet! (scary, no?)

-marius

In reply to Re: Replacing SQL with perl by marius
in thread Replacing SQL with perl by marvell

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