Advanced Perl Programming

Implementation

This section explains the implementation of Adaptor::DBI and Adaptor::File. We will cover only the key procedures that perform query processing and file or database I/O. Pay as much attention to the design gotchas and unimplemented features as you do to the code.

Adaptor::File

An Adaptor::File instance represents all objects stored in one file. When this adaptor is created (using new), it reads the entire file and translates the data to in-memory objects. Slurping the entire file into memory avoids the problem of having to implement fancy on-disk schemes for random access to variable-length data; after all, that is the job of DBM and database implementations. For this reason, this approach is not recommended for large numbers of objects (over 1,000, to pick a number).

The file adaptor has an attribute called all_instances, a hash table of all objects given to its store method (and indexed by their _id), as shown in Figure 11.2.

Figure 11-2. Structure of file adaptor

Storing objects

Let us examine the two methods for storing objects to files: store() and flush ().

store allocates a new unique identifier for the object (if necessary) and simply pegs the object onto the all_instances hash. It doesn’t send the data to disk.

sub store { # adaptor->store($obj) (@_ == 2) || die 'Usage adaptor->store ($obj_to_store)'; my ($this, $obj_to_store) = @_; # $this is 'all_instances' my ...