At $work I'm getting a few basic tools set up. Since we use PostgreSQL, I'm using DBD::Pg. With DBD::Oracle I grew to like some of the more flexible ways of entering parameters, so I look for that in DBD::Pg. I find that there are three options.
1. The DBI standard ?. If I was happy with that, I wouldn't be reading this documentation.
2. They allow positional parameters with $1, $2, $3. Given that this is inside of Perl, I'm going to constantly be wondering whether I'm accidentally interpolating in variables. Better than ? but I don't really like the syntax. The visual disambiguation from variable interpolation was a reason to prefer DBD::Oracle's :1, :2 and so on.
3. They support full named parameters. :foo. :bar. Yay! I like it! But they go on to say, While this syntax is supported by DBD::Pg, its use is highly discouraged.
Huh? Does anyone know why they discourage the cleanest and most flexible solution? Personally whenever I get the chance to work by name rather than by position, I jump at the opportunity. But I'm somewhat reluctant to use a feature that the software authors don't want me to use without knowing the reason for that dislike...
