As a followup to my previous entry, I just discovered that Oracle's client comes with its own complete installation of perl. It's an older version (5.8.3). This tells me several things:
- I don't know what, if anything, Oracle does with this perl (maybe they have programs written against it somewhere in the installation, or maybe they just offer it as an installation of perl which they will personally support and take responsibility for), but whatever it is, they know that they cannot depend on some other party's perl installation, probably for all the reasons I mentioned before.
- They're sticking with 5.8.3 right now because that's what's tested with their purposes. If and when they update the version of perl for a future release, it will presumably receive some testing to make sure everything still works with it. It's far more controlled, from their point of view, to upgrade perl when they want to, rather than when the vendor does, or whenever there's a new version.
Be like Oracle. You need your own perl.
For in-database functions?
Alias on 2006-12-09T01:14:54
I can't say for sure if it is what the Perl is for, but Oracle does allow you to write Perl stored procudures inside the database (Some people apparently love it for doing SQL with "real" regex support.
So it may well be for this.
Re:For in-database functions?
jdavidb on 2006-12-11T15:01:42
Any idea what version was the first to support this? Last time I checked, if you wanted to do such stored Perl procedures, you had to compile an external module or something. But it makes sense for them to include it, and it makes sense that this may be what the included perl is for.
