20 years and counting
So myself and I think most of the Perl world missed an important date on October 12th
Well that day marked the first release of DBI to CPAN.
It is hard to judge how much an impact this hunk of code has had on dare I say it the world. IMHO it was the first killer app for the web and still with us today being actively developed and improved on and has kept its place just quietly sitting in the background doing its job.
If I sit back and think of 20 years ago I had just upgraded to a 12k modem from a 1.2k, browsed the internet, (If you could call it that) with text browser, Netscape was only release 1 day later, (By the way it too me 19+ hours to download it) a few week later one used something call web-crawler
Near the end of 95 someone sold a broken laser printer on a new site called e-bay but we already new it as AuctionWeb. I remember spending 45mins trying to buy a book from a new site called Amazon just to discover the book, cost 25$ to ship and would ship within 20 days after payment was received. Google was a typo of Googol, which is now reversed in this editor, there where 9 planets and Kodak was one of the best stock to own and some little twerp called Zuckerberg was acting up in Talmud class.
Oh well how times change.
I bet TimB got a penny each time someone used DBI he would be well up there on the Forbes to 10.
Long time Perl guy, a few CPAN mods allot of work on DBD::Oracle and a few YAPC presentations
I started using DBI since 1999 and it wouldn't be a hyperbole to say that I just fell in love with its simplicity, power, and amazing flexibility to provide a smooth interface that various adapters can be written to ferry data across.
It still remains one of my favorite modules.
I believe there was even a Safari/Oreilly book at that time, purely on "Perl DBI" module.
Good old days! :)
It was the DBI module that brought me back to Perl, early this century. I had to transfer data from access databases to a MySQL server. The DBI module made that very easy and painless.
Nowadays for all my small database needs, I use SQLite and again DBI makes working with this database very easy. Other than the connection string, nothing new has to be learned: all the little technical detail is abstracted away in the DBD module. For sure, splitting database handling between the "public"" DBI and the "private" DBD was a stroke of genius.
CountZero