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

I just installed Strawberryperl 10.0.1 on windows xp and I am trying to connect to Oracle. My code looks like this 
#! /usr/bin/perl

use DBI;
use strict;
use warnings;

print "Hello.\n";
my $dsn = 'dbi:Oracle:sid=ORCL';
my $user = 'MyID';
my $password = 'MyPWD';
my $dbh = DBI->connect($dsn,$user,$password,RaiseError => 1, AutoCommi
+t => 0)
            || die "Database connection failed: $DBI::errstr";
print "Database connection succeeded.\n";
$dbh->disconnect();
print "Bye, bye ;-)\n";
exit

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When I run the script I get the "Hello" message, and 2 perl messages. Can't use string ("1") as a HASH ref while "strict refs" in use at ../strawberry/perl/site/lib/DBI.pm line 560. DBI->connect using 'old-style' syntax is deprected and will be in error in future versions at DBITest.prl line 24. I'm not too concerned about the syntax message, but obviously the first message is a showstopper. Can somebody help me out with the message from DBI.pm and, if possible, point me to some documentation on the 'new-style' syntax? Thanks

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Re: Error messages from DBI (\%attr)
by kyle (Abbot) on Jun 12, 2008 at 16:42 UTC

    Look closer at the example in the DBI documentation. Your connect() would probably work this way: 

    my $dbh = DBI->connect($dsn,$user,$password,
                       { RaiseError => 1, AutoCommit => 0 })
            || die "Database connection failed: $DBI::errstr";

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    The last argument is a hash reference. If you're not familiar with references, have a look at perlreftut and perlref. After that, maybe References quick reference.

    Update: Also, since you're using RaiseError, you don't need to die explicitly. DBI will do that for you if there's a problem.

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[d/l]
[select]
      I changed the connect() to this: my $dbh = DBI->connect($dsn,$user,$password) or die $DBI::errstr; That gets me past the syntax warning and the HASH error. Now Perl can't find DBD/Oracle.pm, but that's a different issue. Thanks for your help.
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[d/l]

        You do realize that you've not turned on the RaiseError and not turned of AutoCommit, right? Read the parent again, you'll want to use his syntax -- all you were missing was a pair of braces.

        <–radiant.matrix–>
        Ramblings and references
        “A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.” — Herm Albright
        I haven't found a problem yet that can't be solved by a well-placed trebuchet
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