Chapter 6. Perl and Relational Databases
Relational
database systems are extremely important in all kinds of
computingcommercial as well as scientific. The Perl programmer
can perform most database manipulations from Perl programs using
modules written for this purpose. I'll briefly
review database lore and then concentrate on an introduction to the
Perl modules that provide an interface to relational databases.This and the remaining chapters of this book will continue to look at
fundamental Perl topics but with this difference: these topics rely
on Perl modules, not on new Perl syntax. The reason for this is a
deliberate decision by the Perl language designers to keep the
language itself fairly small and to move as much functionality as
possible into modules. This decision is interesting and important,
and it has the practical effect of making modules quite important in
Perl.First, I'll provide a quick explanation of database
terminology and acronyms. Since I'll be discussing
only relational
databases, I sometimes say database to mean relational database.
(They aren't synonymous in general, however.) I say
DBMS (or database management system(s))
to refer to the software that provides database capabilities, such as
MySQL or Oracle. Database or relational database refers to the
definition and implementation of a particular collection of data in a
DBMS, such as the examples I show later in the chapter. These terms,
database for the data itself, and database management system for the
software system that handles the data, are often used informally and
interchangeably, and it's usually clear what is
meant. |
لطفا منتظر باشید ...
