| Tie::DBI - Tie hashes to DBI relational databases |
Tie::DBI - Tie hashes to DBI relational databases
use Tie::DBI;
tie %h,'Tie::DBI','mysql:test','test','id',{CLOBBER=>1};
tie %h,'Tie::DBI',{db => 'mysql:test',
table => 'test',
key => 'id',
user => 'nobody',
password => 'ghost',
CLOBBER => 1};
# fetching keys and values
@keys = keys %h;
@fields = keys %{$h{$keys[0]}};
print $h{'id1'}->{'field1'};
while (($key,$value) = each %h) {
print "Key = $key:\n";
foreach (sort keys %$value) {
print "\t$_ => $value->{$_}\n";
}
}
# changing data
$h{'id1'}->{'field1'} = 'new value';
$h{'id1'} = { field1 => 'newer value',
field2 => 'even newer value',
field3 => "so new it's squeaky clean" };
# other functions
tied(%h)->commit;
tied(%h)->rollback;
tied(%h)->select_where('price > 1.20');
@fieldnames = tied(%h)->fields;
$dbh = tied(%h)->dbh;
This module allows you to tie Perl associative arrays (hashes) to SQL databases using the DBI interface. The tied hash is associated with a table in a local or networked database. One column becomes the hash key. Each row of the table becomes an associative array, from which individual fields can be set or retrieved.
To use this module, you must have the DBI interface and at least one DBD (database driver) installed. Make sure that your database is up and running, and that you can connect to it and execute queries using DBI.
tie %var,'Tie::DBI',[database,table,keycolumn] [,\%options]
Tie a variable to a database by providing the variable name, the tie interface (always ``Tie::DBI''), the data source name, the table to tie to, and the column to use as the hash key. You may also pass various flags to the interface in an associative array.
Note that some drivers (Oracle in particular) have an irritating habit of appending blanks to the end of fixed-length fields. This will screw up Tie::DBI's routines for getting key names. To avoid this you should create the database handle with a ChopBlanks option of TRUE. You should also use a PrintError option of true to avoid complaints during STORE and LISTFIELD calls.
It is possible to omit the database, table and keycolumn arguments, in which case the module tries to retrieve the values from the options array. The options array contains a set of option/value pairs. If not provided, defaults are assumed. The options are:
Operation Clobber Comment
$i = $h{strawberries}->{price} 0 All read operations
$h{strawberries}->{price} += 5 1 Update fields
$h{bananas}={price=>23,quant=>3} 1 Add records
delete $h{strawberries} 2 Delete records
%h = () 3 Clear entire table
undef %h 3 Another clear operation
All database operations are contingent upon your access privileges. If your account does not have write permission to the database, hash store operations will fail despite the setting of CLOBBER.
commit() method.
The autocommit option defaults to true.
The tied array represents the database table. Each entry in the hash
is a record, keyed on the column chosen in the tie() statement.
Ordinarily this will be the table's primary key, although any unique
column will do.
Fetching an individual record returns a reference to a hash of field names and values. This hash reference is itself a tied object, so that operations on it directly affect the database.
In the following examples, we will assume a database table structured like this one:
-produce-
produce_id price quantity description
strawberries 1.20 8 Fresh Maine strawberries
apricots 0.85 2 Ripe Norwegian apricots
bananas 1.30 28 Sweet Alaskan bananas
kiwis 1.50 9 Juicy New York kiwi fruits
eggs 1.00 12 Farm-fresh Atlantic eggs
We tie the variable %produce to the table in this way:
tie %produce,'Tie::DBI',{db => 'mysql:stock',
table => 'produce',
key => 'produce_id',
CLOBBER => 2 # allow most updates
};
We can get the list of keys this way:
print join(",",keys %produce);
=> strawberries,apricots,bananas,kiwis
Or get the price of eggs thusly:
$price = $produce{eggs}->{price};
print "The price of eggs = $price";
=> The price of eggs = 1.2
String interpolation works as you would expect:
print "The price of eggs is still $produce{eggs}->{price}"
=> The price of eggs is still 1.2
Various types of syntactic sugar are allowed. For example, you can refer to $produce{eggs}{price} rather than $produce{eggs}->{price}. Array slices are fully supported as well:
($apricots,$kiwis) = @produce{apricots,kiwis};
print "Kiwis are $kiwis->{description};
=> Kiwis are Juicy New York kiwi fruits
($price,$description) = @{$produce{eggs}}{price,description};
=> (2.4,'Farm-fresh Atlantic eggs')
If you provide the tied hash with a comma-delimited set of record names, and you are not requesting an array slice, then the module does something interesting. It generates a single SQL statement that fetches the records from the database in a single pass (rather than the multiple passes required for an array slice) and returns the result as a reference to an array. For many records, this can be much faster. For example:
$result = $produce{apricots,bananas};
=> ARRAY(0x828a8ac)
($apricots,$bananas) = @$result;
print "The price of apricots is $apricots->{price}";
=> The price of apricots is 0.85
Field names work in much the same way:
($price,$quantity) = @{$produce{apricots}{price,quantity}};
print "There are $quantity apricots at $price each";
=> There are 2 apricots at 0.85 each";
Note that this takes advantage of a bit of Perl syntactic sugar which automagically treats $h{'a','b','c'} as if the keys were packed together with the $; pack character. Be careful not to fall into this trap:
$result = $h{join( ',', 'apricots', 'bananas' )};
=> undefined
What you really want is this:
$result = $h{join( $;, 'apricots', 'bananas' )};
=> ARRAY(0x828a8ac)
If CLOBBER is set to a non-zero value (and the underlying database privileges allow it), you can update the database with new values. You can operate on entire records at once or on individual fields within a record.
To insert a new record or update an existing one, assign a hash reference to the record. For example, you can create a new record in %produce with the key ``avocados'' in this manner:
$produce{avocados} = { price => 2.00,
quantity => 8,
description => 'Choice Irish avocados' };
This will work with any type of hash reference, including records extracted from another table or database.
Only keys that correspond to valid fields in the table will be accepted. You will be warned if you attempt to set a field that doesn't exist, but the other fields will be correctly set. Likewise, you will be warned if you attempt to set the key field. These warnings can be turned off by setting the WARN option to a zero value. It is not currently possible to add new columns to the table. You must do this manually with the appropriate SQL commands.
The same syntax can be used to update an existing record. The fields given in the hash reference replace those in the record. Fields that aren't explicitly listed in the hash retain their previous values. In the following example, the price and quantity of the ``kiwis'' record are updated, but the description remains the same:
$produce{kiwis} = { price=>1.25,quantity=>20 };
You may update existing records on a field-by-field manner in the natural way:
$produce{eggs}{price} = 1.30;
$produce{eggs}{price} *= 2;
print "The price of eggs is now $produce{eggs}{price}";
=> The price of eggs is now 2.6.
Obligingly enough, you can use this syntax to insert new records too, as in $produce{mangoes}{description}=``Sun-ripened Idaho mangoes''. However, this type of update is inefficient because a separate SQL statement is generated for each field. If you need to update more than one field at a time, use the record-oriented syntax shown earlier. It's much more efficient because it gets the work done with a single SQL command.
Insertions and updates may fail for any of a number of reasons, most commonly:
The module dies with an error message when it encounters an error during an update. To trap these erorrs and continue processing, wrap the update an eval().
The tie object supports several useful methods. In order to call
these methods, you must either save the function result from the tie()
call (which returns the object), or call tied() on the tie variable to
recover the object.
errstr()Connect() is responsible for
establishing the connection with the DBI database. Errstr() and
error() return $DBI::errstr and $DBI::error respectively. You may
may override these methods in subclasses if you wish. For example,
replace connect() with this code in order to use persistent database
connections in Apache modules:
use Apache::DBI; # somewhere in the declarations
sub connect {
my ($class,$dsn,$user,$password,$options) = @_;
return Apache::DBI->connect($dsn,$user,
$password,$options);
}
=item commit()
(tied %produce)->commit();
When using a database with the autocommit option turned off, values
that are stored into the hash will not become permanent until commit()
is called. Otherwise they are lost when the application terminates or
the hash is untied.
Some SQL databases don't support transactions, in which case you will see a warning message if you attempt to use this function.
rollback()(tied %produce)->rollback();
When using a database with the autocommit option turned off, this function will roll back changes to the database to the state they were in at the last commit(). This function has no effect on database that don't support transactions.
select_where()
@keys=(tied %produce)->select_where('price > 1.00 and quantity < 10');
This executes a limited form of select statement on the tied table and returns a list of records that satisfy the conditions. The argument you provide should be the contents of a SQL WHERE clause, minus the keyword ``WHERE'' and everything that ordinarily precedes it. Anything that is legal in the WHERE clause is allowed, including function calls, ordering specifications, and sub-selects. The keys to those records that meet the specified conditions are returned as an array, in the order in which the select statement returned them.
Don't expect too much from this function. If you want to execute a complex query, you're better off using the database handle (see below) to make the SQL query yourself with the DBI interface.
dbh()$dbh = (tied %produce)->dbh(); This returns the tied hash's underlying database handle. You can use this handle to create and execute your own SQL queries.
You can get and set the values of CLOBBER, DEBUG and WARN by directly accessing the object's hash:
(tied %produce)->{DEBUG}++;
This lets you change the behavior of the tied hash on the fly, such as temporarily granting your program write permission.
There are other variables there too, such as the name of the key column and database table. Change them at your own risk!
What is the performance hit when you use this module rather than the
direct DBI interface? It can be significant. To measure the
overhead, I used a simple benchmark in which Perl parsed a 6180 word
text file into individual words and stored them into a database,
incrementing the word count with each store. The benchmark then read
out the words and their counts in an each() loop. The database driver
was mySQL, running on a 133 MHz Pentium laptop with Linux 2.0.30. I
compared Tie::RDBM, to DB_File, and to the same task using vanilla DBI
SQL statements. The results are shown below:
UPDATE FETCH
Tie::DBI 70 s 6.1 s
Vanilla DBI 14 s 2.0 s
DB_File 3 s 1.06 s
There is about a five-fold penalty for updates, and a three-fold penalty for fetches when using this interface. Some of the penalty is due to the overhead for creating sub-objects to handle individual fields, and some of it is due to the inefficient way the store and fetch operations are implemented. For example, using the tie interface, a statement like $h{record}{field}++ requires as much as four trips to the database: one to verify that the record exists, one to fetch the field, and one to store the incremented field back. If the record doesn't already exist, an additional statement is required to perform the insertion. I have experimented with cacheing schemes to reduce the number of trips to the database, but the overhead of maintaining the cache is nearly equal to the performance improvement, and cacheing raises a number of potential concurrency problems.
Clearly you would not want to use this interface for applications that require a large number of updates to be processed rapidly.
The each() call produces a fatal error when used with the Sybase
driver to access Microsoft SQL server. This is because this server
only allows one query to be active at a given time. A workaround is
to use keys() to fetch all the keys yourself. It is not known whether
real Sybase databases suffer from the same problem.
The delete() operator will not work correctly for setting field values
to null with DBD::CSV or with DBD::Pg. CSV files do not have a good
conception of database nulls. Instead you will set the field to an
empty string. DBD::Pg just seems to be broken in this regard.
Lincoln Stein, lstein@cshl.org
Copyright (c) 1998, Lincoln D. Stein
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
The latest version can be obtained from: http://www.genome.wi.mit.edu/~lstein/Tie-DBI/ =head1 SEE ALSO
perl(1), DBI(3), Tie::RDBM(3)
| Tie::DBI - Tie hashes to DBI relational databases |