Yesterday was "Queens day" here in the Netherlands. For all those people who love the monarchy it's the day of the year where they can see the queen visiting all kinds of uninteresting places and events. For the others it's just a nice day off, with all kinds of fairs and music events. I went to Groningen, where I was born an raised, with my girfriend to show her the city. She had never been there before. At the end of the day we decided to visit the Casino there and try our luck. After all, I was very lucky the day before, so why not try my luck in the casino? And very lucky we were. Together we left with almost 4 times as much money as we started with. So in the end we had a free trip, free meals, free cabs, free gifts and some money left.
Even today my luck isn't over. All of monday I struggled with installing Oracle 8i on my Redhat Linux 7.2 installation. I used all kinds of howtos and none of them worked. Until today I found another one explaining why the others wouldn't work on 7.2 (because the installer needs an old version of the binutils) and I followed the howto step by step and it works. At this very moment I'm doing the last steps of the installation of Oracle 8i on this machine.
It's kinda weird though to be forced to install Oracle's database server to be able to install DBD-Oracle (the reason why I had to install this). In a few minutes my machine is stuffed with almost 700mb of Oracle thingies I don't need or use just to be able to do an install of DBD::Oracle...And no, just installing a client won't work (as I read somewhere in another howto), because the installation of the DBD needs some files that will only be installed when you installed the server part...
it's time to write a perl-only DBD::Oracle...any volunteers?
Tim Bunce is working on an Oracle::OCI module. I've never completely understood, but I believe this is Oracle's call level interface as opposed to the preprocessed Pro*C you usually have to use. If it's what I think it is, someone could write a DBD backend using this module (I think that's the plan) and you wouldn't need to install all that junk. I'm not sure, though, if Oracle::OCI needs to link a C library or not.
If OCI specifies the actual protocol over the wire, it should be completely possible to implement in 100% Perl. At work I've been wishing we could do that with Remedy, but I think you can only get at that system through the provided C library. (For which there is, fortunately, a Perl wrapper.)
