Programming the Perl DBI

DBI in the Real World

DBI is being used in many companies across the world today, including large-scale, mission-critical environments such as NASA and Motorola. Consider the following testimonials by avid DBI users from around the world:

We developed and support a large scale telephone call logging and analysis system for a major client of ours. The system collects ~1 GB of call data per day from over 1,200,000 monitored phone numbers. ~424 GB has been processed so far (over 6,200,000,000 calls). Data is processed and loaded into Oracle using DBI and DBD::Oracle. The database holds rolling data for around 20 million calls. The system generates over 44,000 PostScript very high quality reports per month (~five pages with eleven color graphs and five tables) generated by using Perl to manipulate FrameMaker templates. [Values correct as of July 1999, and rising steadily.]

The whole system runs on three dual processor Sun SPARC Ultra 2 machines—one for data acquisition and processing, one for Oracle and the third does most of the report production (which is also distributed across the other two machines). Almost the entire system is implemented in Perl.

There is only one non-Perl program and that’s only because it existed already and isn’t specific to this system. The other non-Perl code is a few small libraries linked into Perl using the XS interface.

A quote from a project summary by a senior manager: “Less than a year later the service went live. This was subsequently celebrated as ...