Portability in practice
Portability requires care and testing - it can be tricky
Platform Portability - the easier bit
- Availability of database client software and DBD driver
- DBD::Proxy can address both these issues - see later
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Database Portability - more tricky but newer versions of the DBI are helping
- Differences in SQL dialects cause most problems
- Differences in data types can also be a problem
- Driver capabilities (placeholders etc.)
- Database meta-data (keys and indices etc.)
- A standard test suite for DBI drivers is needed
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DBIx::AnyDBD functionality has been merged into the DBI
- can help with writing portable code, just needs documenting