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

Does anyone know if there was ever an effort to produce a DBMS system written from ground up in perl?

Every once in a while we find daemons written in perl for all sorts of different purposes which usually get flamed down by perl non-advocates focusing on perfomance issues (ie: "a serious daemon should be written in C").

Larry himself stated several times that perl is an great glue-language, and its obvious that for your every SQL needs we have DBI, but can anyone see a reason why not to do one?

cheers!

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
RE: Perl SQL Daemon?
by t0mas (Priest) on Apr 22, 2000 at 14:29 UTC
    It's trivial to write such a daemon using DBI:CSV. I've used such a daemon in some apps of mine. Problem is that DBI:CSV doesn't support a full ANSI SQL syntax (no joins etc.) so any effort in this direction should start with spiceing up DBI:CSV. /t0mas
[reply]
      While I agree the spicing the CSV driver might be a good starting point, one still has to remeber that just a plain CSV file won't cut it for a few issues. Namely:
      • filesystem performance
      • datatype support (longs, lobs, raws, etc)
      • field constraints
      • table constraints
      • roles and permissions
      • common objects (databases, tablespaces, etc)
      • client server support
      I guess what I'm getting at is: wouldn't an entirely new data format be needed to support all of the above features, or could these be acheived in some mischeivious (spellchecker needed) "linking-globing-OS glueing" kinda way?

      This question has definitly become a meditation...
[reply]
RE: Perl SQL Daemon?
by BBQ (Curate) on Apr 19, 2000 at 21:46 UTC
    BTW: I'm not sure this should be here or in Meditations, but since it IS a question....

    #!/home/bbq/bin/perl
    # Trust no1!
[reply]

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