Programming the Perl DBI

DBI—Thrashed and Mutated

Meanwhile, since September 29, 1992, before ODBC even existed, a group of interested parties had been working on thrashing out a database-independent interface specification for Perl 4. After approximately eighteen months, DBperl (as it was then known) was quite stable, and implementation was about to start.^[62] However, at this time, Larry Wall was starting to release alpha versions of Perl 5.

It soon became apparent that the object-oriented features of Perl 5 could be used to implement a dramatically improved database interface. So the work on the DBI took a new direction and, at the same time, started to be loosely modeled as a superset of the SQL Access Group CLI standard. Thus, at a high-level, the DBI has much in common with both that standard and ODBC as we know it today.

^[62] Archaeologists can find the specification of this very old version at http://www.perl.com/CPAN/modules/dbperl/DBI/dbispec.v05.