/ 
DBD-Sybase-0.05
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/ DBD::Sybase

NAME

DBD::Sybase - Sybase database driver for the DBI module

SYNOPSIS

use DBI;

$dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:Sybase:", $user, $passwd);

# See the DBI module documentation for full details

DESCRIPTION

DBD::Sybase is a Perl module which works with the DBI module to provide access to Sybase databases.

Connecting to Sybase

The interfaces file

The DBD::Sybase module is built on top of the Sybase Open Client Client Library API. This library makes use of the Sybase interfaces file (sql.ini on Win32 machines) to make a link between a logical server name (e.g. SYBASE) and the physical machine / port number that the server is running on. The OpenClient library uses the environment variable SYBASE to find the location of the interfaces file, as well as other files that it needs (such as locale files). The SYBASE environment is the path to the Sybase installation (eg '/usr/local/sybase'). If you need to set it in your scripts, then you must set it in a BEGIN{} block:

BEGIN {
    $ENV{SYBASE} = '/opt/sybase/11.0.2';
}

$dbh = DBI->connect('dbi:Sybase', $user, $passwd);

Specifying the server name

The server that DBD::Sybase connects to defaults to SYBASE, but can be specified in two ways.

You can set the DSQUERY environement variable:

$ENV{DSQUERY} = "ENGINEERING";
$dbh = DBI->connect('dbi:Sybase:', $user, $passwd);

Or you can pass the server name in the first argument to connect():

$dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:Sybase:server=ENGINEERING", $user, $passwd);

Specifying other connection specific parameters

It is sometimes necessary (or beneficial) to specify other connection properties. Currently the following are supported:

charset

Specify the character set that the client uses.

     $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:Sybase:charset=iso_1",
			 $user, $passwd);
language

Specify the language that the client uses.

     $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:Sybase:language=us_english",
			 $user, $passwd);
packetSize

Specify the network packet size that the connection should use. Using a larger packet size can increase performance for certain types of queries. See the Sybase documentation on how to enable this feature on the server.

     $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:Sybase:packetSize=8192",
			 $user, $passwd);

These different parameters (as well as the server name) can be strung together by separating each entry with a semi-colon:

    $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:Sybase:server=ENGINEERING;packetSize=8192;language=us_english;charset=iso_1",
			$user, $pwd);

Handling Multiple Result Sets

Sybase's Transact SQL has the ability to return multiple result sets from a single SQL statement. For example the query:

select b.title, b.author, s.amount
  from books b, sales s
 where s.authorID = b.authorID
 order by b.author, b.title
compute sum(s.amount) by b.author

which lists sales by author and title and also computes the total sales by author returns two types of rows. The DBI spec doesn't really handle this situation, nor the more hairy

exec my_proc @p1='this', @p2='that', @p3 out

where my_proc could return any number of result sets (ie it could perform an unknown number of select statements.

I've decided to handle this by returning an empty row at the end of each result set - but it you suspect that there may be more data from your current query, then you can call any of the fetch routines again, and they will return the first row in the next result set if there is one, or an empty row it this really was the last row.

BUGS

Placeholders (ie setting up a query with '?' parameters to be filled in later) are not supported at the moment, so $sth->bind_param() is not implemented, the @bind_values argument to $sth->execute is ignored, and the %attr and @bind_values parameters to $dbh->do are also ignored. Placeholders will be implemented in a future version.

SEE ALSO

DBI

AUTHOR

DBD::Sybase by Michael Peppler

COPYRIGHT

The DBD::Sybase module is Copyright (c) 1997 Michael Peppler. The DBD::Sybase module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself with the exception that it cannot be placed on a CD-ROM or similar media for commercial distribution without the prior approval of the author.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Tim Bunce for DBI, obviously.

See also "ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS" in DBI.