Using MySQL Stored Programs with Perl

Perl is an open source programming language widely used for system administration tasks, web site development, data manipulation, and reporting. Perl was the brainchild of Larry Wall, who initially developed the language to provide a language for the easy manipulation of text files and the like. Perl rapidly became very popular among the Unix community as a powerful, easy-to-use, general-purpose programming language. During the explosion of the World Wide Web, Perl's ease of use and database connectivity capabilities made it the preferred choice for CGI-based data-driven web sites.

From very early on, Perl was an extensible language and benefited greatly from a wide variety of user-contributed packages allowing it to do everything from handling Unix mail to performing complex statistical analyses. One category of extension showed particularly rapid uptakeextensions that enabled Perl to interact with relational databases, allowing Perl users to manipulate RDBMS data as easily as they could manipulate text files. Initially, these extensions were platform specificthe extension used to access Oracle had little in common with that used to access Sybase, for instance.

Perl's DBI (DataBase Interface) module evolved to provide a common syntax for interacting with relational databases. DBI defines interfaces and utilities common to all databases, while for each specific relational database, we use a DBD (DataBase Driver) module that contains the database-specific implementation of the DBI interface, and may also include database-specific utility routines. The preferred way to use MySQL with Perl is through the DBD::mysql module.

In this chapter we will first provide a general overview of DBD::mysql capabilities and then move on to show how to use DBD::mysql to call MySQL stored programs.