Managing & Using MySQL, 2nd Edition

Introduction to DBI

The Perl DBI interface is fully described in Programming the Perl DBI by Alligator Descartes and Tim Bunce (O’Reilly). The manpage for DBI is also a very informative reference. This chapter should make you competent, though not expert.

Before launching into a CGI application, let’s try a couple trivial Perl programs you can run from the command line. These were tested on Unix and Linux systems, but should work the same way on other operating systems as well. After looking at the code, we’ll show you how to provide the actual database and discuss some optimizations.