Lowering the barrier to entry

[Loren M. Lang]

Looking for ways to keep the barrier to entry for Windows users when
we switch to using the Perl Database Interface (DBI) I found a back-end
for using CSV files. The entire module including a SQL parser is
written in Perl keeping it portable across operating systems and stores
each table as a CSV file. The performance will probably be worse than
it is now, but it will run everywhere. Strawberry Perl and ActivePerl
both have packages, as well as Ubuntu. ActivePerl also has native
packages for SQLite and MySQL as well. There are also Pure Perl
packages for PostgreSQL and MySQL (non-native). Pure Perl means that
it's entirely written in Perl and does not depend on native libraries
such as libmysqlclient.so, that way Windows users don't need a C
compiler. For Strawberry Perl, I didn't see a SQLite packages, but I
did see the Pure Perl MySQL package. Overall, we're probably safe
switching to using DBI for storage and keeping Windows Support simple.

--
Loren M. Lang
lor...@north-winds.org
http://www.north-winds.org/

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