Programming the Perl DBI

Starting Up dbish

dbish is an executable program bundled with the DBI. You should be able to start it up by typing:

dbish

which will return a prompt in the following manner:

DBI::Shell 10.5 using DBI 1.14

WARNING: The DBI::Shell interface and functionality are
=======  very likely to change in subsequent versions!

Available DBI drivers:
 1: dbi:ADO
 2: dbi:ExampleP
 3: dbi:Oracle
 4: dbi:Proxy
Enter driver name or number, or full 'dbi:...:...' DSN:

Some drivers require real username and password authentication to connect to databases. To support this requirement, you can supply additional arguments to dbish in the form of:

dbish <data_source> [username] [password]

For example:

dbish '' stones stones

or:

dbish dbi: stones stones

In this case, we haven’t specified a driver, and so we’ll choose one interactively through the menus. We can also bypass the menus by putting in the data source name for the desired database:

dbish dbi:Oracle:archaeo stones stones

If you don’t specify a driver on the command line, the displayed menus allow you to select a type of database by listing the various drivers available. For example, if an Oracle database contained the megalithic database, you would select the dbi:Oracle data source by typing 3. This will result in that specific database driver being queried for available data sources. For example:

Enter data source to connect to: 
 1: dbi:Oracle:archaeo
 2: dbi:Oracle:sales
Enter data source or number, or full 'dbi:...:...' DSN:

This example shows that the underlying ...