Programming the Perl DBI

Setting up a proxy server

The DBI proxy server is simply a layer on top of the DBI; it can only be a server for the data sources that the underlying DBI is able to connect to. So, before we get involved in setting up the proxy server to accept proxy client connections, we must install any database drivers that its clients may need. For our example of connecting to an Access database, we’ll need to install the DBD::ODBC module.^[67]

You will also need to configure your ODBC data source within the Windows ODBC Control Panel. For our megalithic database, let’s call the ODBC data source archaeo.

We can test that this data source is correctly configured using the DBI Shell dbish locally on the Windows machine:

dbish dbi:ODBC:archaeo

or via a short script that can be run on your Windows machine:

use DBI;
$dbh = DBI->connect( "dbi:ODBC:archaeo", "username", "password" );
$dbh->disconnect(  );

If dbish connects, or if no errors occur when executing the script, it looks like everything’s installed and configured correctly.

The easiest way to set up a DBI proxy server is to use the script called dbiproxy , which is distributed with the core DBI module. The DBI::ProxyServer module, used by dbiproxy, has a few prerequisite modules that must be installed in order for it to work: PlRPC and Net::Daemon . These can be downloaded and installed from CPAN using:

perl -MCPAN -e 'install Bundle::DBI'

Or, if you are running the ActiveState Perl for Windows, you can install these modules separately via PPM (since ...