Re: DBI

[John C. S. <js...@im...>]

Maybe a shortish explanation should go in the faq.

The DBI is Tim Bunce's extremely flexible, vendor independent database
interface for the perl language.

To quote him directly, 'DBI is a database access Application Programming
Interface (API) for the Perl Language. The DBI API Specification defines
a set of functions, variables and conventions that provide a consistent 
database interface independant of the actual database being used.'.

Programmers write code using this interface. Should the
programmer/user/client/etc decide, for any reason, to use a completely
different database manager *after* the application is written, the code
stays the same and all that has to be done is change the DBD driver.

The DBD driver is the actual handling code that sits between DBI and the
database managers. There are DBD drivers for all major databases. Thus
programmers can write core code that transparently accesses a database.
Most SQL-Ledger installations will use DBD::Pg, which is the appropriate
driver for the PostgreSQL database manager but later on other options
will be available.

Good luck


John Christian Stoddart
Caracas - Venezuela


On Wed, 2002-01-02 at 11:59, Richard Lyons wrote:
> Can anyone save me a lot of earching and learning and tell me:
> 
> What are DBI and DBD?
> 
> "Why do I get DBI not installed" instead of sql-ledger/admin?  
> 
> I've just installed sql-ledger on an RH7.1 workstation.  I have 
> searched Redhat's rpms for DBI to no avail.  Rpmfind has some listed, 
> but not RedHat -- and I've no idea if that is the right thing to do, as 
> I simply don't know what I'm doing here.
> 
> --
> richard
>