I would tend to think that such a ping would be a special case, but I agree with you to keep it as is:
Simply because overloading ping() with a complete eval'ed select statement would be trivial. And the opposite isn't. --- Henri Asseily henri.tel On Nov 5, 2012, at 4:35 PM, Charles Jardine <c...@cam.ac.uk> wrote: > On 05/11/12 02:47, Greg Sabino Mullane wrote: > > >>> Also by the time an application does execute some SQL, the the >>> connection/node/server/network could have dropped and so the application >>> 'will have to check & recover from write failures at that point anyway." >> >> This is a bit of a red herring. You could say that about any database action, >> anytime ever. I personally think a simple select is better than relying >> on a low-level library call, as it does a more complete end-to-end check >> that is almost certainly closer to what the caller is going to use the >> connection for. > > I rather strongly disagree. It is possible to do useful work over a connection > in situations when a 'simple select' is not possible. My production > Oracle database is protected by a physical standby database. This > database is, in Oracle terms, mounted but not open. A user with the SYSADMIN > privilege can connect to the database. It is possible use virtual views to > monitor the database and ALTER SYSTEM commands to change its state. However > it is not possible to select from any table. SELECT 1 FROM DUAL will fail. > > I would like to see $dbh->ping to continue to return a true values in cases > like this. > > -- > Charles Jardine - Computing Service, University of Cambridge > c...@cam.ac.uk Tel: +44 1223 334506, Fax: +44 1223 334679
