Is perl and DBI good enough? (fwd)

[Honza Pazdziora]

Toto probehlo v konferenci dbi-users a mozna to nekoho zaujme. Myslim,
ze by perl na muni.cz mohlo byt vhodnym mistem i pro fwdy podobnych zprav
(z oblasti DBI, mod_perl, clp.announce, ...) Pokud k tomuto napadu
mate nejaky komentar (pozitivni, negativni), tak prosim asi radsi na
mou osobni adresu, summary poslu.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Honza Pazdziora | adelton na fi.muni.cz | http://www.fi.muni.cz/~adelton/
                   I can take or leave it if I please
------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Subject: Re: Is perl and DBI good enough?
>
>Is it realistic to use perl with DBI for a large project for a big
>company?

Speaking of someone developing in Perl with DBI for a large project for a
large company, yes, yes, and yes.  Here's my experience.

I have found Perl to be the most stable, error free development environment
I have used.  In 9 months of working heavily in Perl, I have found 1 bug in
Perl.  In the same time frame, I have found 12 bugs (some very serious) in
Solaris 2.4, 4 bugs in Solaris 2.5.1, and too many to count in the Sun C++
compiler (the 4.1 compiler).  The only software that rivals Perl in quality
in my book is Linux (I have found 2 bugs in 3 years).

As for DBI, I have found several "features", but no real bugs, yet.  My
biggest complaints about Perl with DBI would be the state of the DBI
documentation lagging the implementation, and the lack of support for
complex data types in the DBI interface.

As for support, we have Sun "gold" support (7x24 hotlines, pagers, and
on-site Sun support staff).  The quickest turn around for a Sun bug fix I've
seen was 2 weeks (and that had to be escalated to the president of AT&T Labs
to get that fast a turn around).

Of the three Perl bug reports I've entered, 2 were bogus (i.e. not Perl's
fault), and I was notified of that fact within hours of reporting the "bug".
The one "real" bug was minor, and I'm still waiting (I expect it'll be in
the next release).  Again the only rival is Linux, for which I had fixes for
all 3 bugs within 1 day of reporting them.

To those providing Perl and DBI/DBD development and support, thanks for
your efforts!

--
Michael P Lindner