A DBperl Questionnaire

The DBperl Group wants to know what the perl community desires in a DB interface. Below is a simple questionnaire that will help us get a feel for what issues/designs the community deems important.

For those not in the know:
Perl is an interpreted language with powerful string and list processing features developed by Larry Wall that "nicely bridges the functionality gap between sh(1) and C." Since relational DB operations are typically textually oriented, perl is particularly well-suited to manage the data flows. The C source code, which is available free of charge and runs on many platforms, contains a user-defined function entry point that permits a developer to extend the basic function set of the language. The DBperl Group seeks to exploit this capability to provide a portable perl interface to a variety of popular RDMS engines by creating a standardized set of functions based on the SQL model. Although no commercial vendors provide support for perl at this time, the combination of the comp.lang.perl newsgroup and an O'Reilly text describing the language has historically proved to be more than adequate in this area.

Please send your replies to perldb-interest_at_vix.com.

1. Which database version of Perl do you currently use?
2. Are you happy with the Perl interface to that database?
3. Which parts of the interface do you particularly like?
4. Which parts of the interface do you particularly dislike?
5. Is there anything in one of the other database interfaces that you would like to have in yours?
6. Is there any additional functionality that you would like to have?