Hi, The DBA in the back row (sorry, I've forgotten your name) asked if there was now a Perl driver for MS SQL Server other than DBD::Sybase. I've been using DBD::ADO at work for some testing and utility scripts: http://search.cpan.org/~sgoeldner/DBD-ADO-2.99/lib/DBD/ADO.pm I don't do anything very demanding and have not compared it to either DBD::Sybase or DBD::ODBC, but it seems to work okay (SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008).
Thanks Uri for the talk. It could be useful to me someday because we have similar files at work but having to do with electric and gas customer data instead. In particular, I'll try to remember to use unpack instead of substr if I work with these formats again from Perl. I found your comment interesting about XML being better suited for this kind of data. Here we find the U.S. customers tend to want one of those same hierarchical fixed length formats (despite past efforts to the contrary: https://web.archive.org/web/20001216133500/http://xml-pipe.org/faq.htm) but the Canadian and European ones are able to use XML. It's like metric all over again. I thought maybe it had something to with accented characters not being needed so much in the U.S., but does Beyoncé not get an electric bill? I wonder if it's similar in the financial and medical industries, but with us the fixed record format is not the thing that's standardized but some binary format I've never seen, handling of which is the domain of a specialized company known as an "EDI Provider." Would it be cynical to think the standardization in these areas is driven as much by rent-seeking as by interoperability? Cause it sounds like a sweet deal. A part of adopting new software for energy retailers always seems to involve a contract for one of these entities. I doubt they're doing anything in these four month contracts that Uri couldn't whip up in a week or so. But since such companies seem chosen based on recommendations from other people in industry, I'm not sure there'd be any way in for an outsider, however technically trivial what they do might be. -- Mike Small [email protected] _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
