Sams Teach Yourself MySQL in 21 Days, Second Edition

Connecting to MySQL with the DBI

With the architecture installed, we will start by writing a Perl program that uses DBI to connect to the MySQL database.

Perl communicates with MySQL using a database handle. The connect() method uses a general format:

$dbh = DBI->connect($data_source, $username, $auth [, %attr]);

So we may use this format:

$dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:mysql:$db_name:hostname:port", $db_user, $db_pass);

or with additional parameters:

$dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:mysql:$db_name:hostname:port", $db_user, $db_pass,
  { RaiseError => 1, PrintError => 0 } );

where $dbh is the database handle returned (if connection is successful), and the parameters are used like this:

• $db_name holds the name of the database to connect to.

• hostname is the ...