sybperl-l Archive

From: "Edward J dot Sabol" <sabol at alderaan dot gsfc dot nasa dot gov>
Subject: Porting Bugzilla to DBD::Sybase: multiple active sth's per dbh
Date: Feb 21 2004 8:05PM

Hi Michael,

DBD::Sybase transparently opens a second connection to the database in order
to emulate multiple active sth's per dbh. That seems pretty reasonable to me,
but it foils Bugzilla's primitive table locking/transaction processing and
makes porting Bugzilla to Sybase difficult and possibly infeasible. Using
cursors is the obvious solution, but that's a rather invasive change to
Bugzilla. I'm getting nothing but flak from the other Bugzilla developers
about this, some of whom want to abandon porting Bugzilla to Sybase entirely.
Anyway, I'm told that DBD::Mysql and DBD::Pg (for older versions of
PostgreSQL) both emulate the capability of having multiple active sth's per
dbh by reading all the data from an unfinished sth into memory when a second
sth is opened. I know it's a hack and not a particularly elegant one and am
not suggesting that the current behavior of DBD::Sybase be changed, but how
feasible would it be to add that capability to DBD::Sybase as an option?
Perhaps some code could be reused from either DBD::Mysql or DBD::Pg...

Thanks,
Ed