DBD::Oracle Trial Release 2
Following our initial trial release, here's another one.
We've attended to the changes suggested from the last release (better changelog and CI integration) and we've also attracted some positive attention from the relevant authorities.
We're still looking for sponsorship to have DBD::Oracle work continue beyond this driveby. If you are interested, or know someone who's interested in chucking some cash into the pot, the best route is probably to contact me (kd) on irc.perl.org or via my cpan email address, zarquon [at] cpan.org
Australian perl hacker. Lead author of the Definitive Guide to Catalyst. Dabbles in javascript, social science and statistical analysis. Seems to have been sucked into the world of cloud and devops.
Well, that's great news! Kudos for all the people involved.
A shame that the main interested party here would be Oracle itself, but the company doesn't care. Every company looks for profit, but Oracle's doesn't mind doing it while taking over the effort for others, specially open source communities.
Oracle still uses Perl heavily inside the company and around it's products for all kinds of tasks, but doesn't give a cent about the community progress and maintenance.
That's not new: years ago Oracle caused problems with DBD::Oracle when decided that CPAN could not ship their precious binaries from Oracle Client made our lives unnecessary miserable for a long time. And that also hits you folks because you can't use the CPAN testers environment for smoke tests.
Nowadays, if it's feasible I just suggest people moving away from Oracle database. If that's not possible (yes, vendor lock-in is alive and strong), I just suggest not using Perl with it: just go with Java, it doesn't matter if the work will take more weeks to be delivered, the manager that signed the purchase order should be already aware of that.
I've installed DBD::Oracle 1.75_40 and it works as well as I expect using the Oracle 12.2.0 client libraries against what's probably an Oracle 11g server. My uses are mostly
SELECTcalls, so not a great testbed. Many thanks for putting the work in!One point to mention because I couldn't find the answer on the fine web: after a recent upgrade to Fedora 28, I had to re-install the Oracle client libraries. There is a missing dependency in the instructions created because Fedora has moved the NIS library out of glibc. You'll need to include
dnf install libnsl libnsl2-develThe error message from the Oracle installer wasn't terribly clear.