DBD::Oracle 1.24 Released

The “Beer” version of DBD::Oracle (1.24) has been released. You can find it at CPAN DBD::Oracle.

DBD::Oracle is a Perl module that works with the DBI module to provide access to Oracle databases. It is maintained by me, John Scoles, under the auspices of Pythian as Open Source/Free Software.

This is largely a maintenance release that fixes a number of bugs. New stuff includes some more improvements to embedded types from Charles Jardine.

Timestamps in Embedded Object now use precision to 6 places.

The big enhancement this round is extending the code to allow more than one row to be returned with a single fetch. Those of you who use Rowcache size will now find that your queries will run much faster.

I have also added the ora_ncs_buff_mtpl parameter, so you can now have very fine grain control over the size of the data buffer using for NCHAR conversions of lobs.

One more little note — thanks to my mistake in compressing a file last week, the version number on CPAN is 1.24a, while the internal Version is still 1.24.

Here is the complete change list:

• Extended precision for OCIDateTimeToText to 6 instead of 0 for embedded types; from John Scoles
• Extended support of Oracle Embedded objects; from Charles Jardine
• Added support for RowsInCache as RO and RowCacheSize as a set-able value on the Statement Handle, so it would comply with DBI spec; by John Scoles with thanks to Martin J. Evans
• Added extended support for 64-bit clients in Makefile.PL; from Ralph Doncaster
• Added extended nvarchar support; from Jan Mach
• Added support for the TYPE attribute on bind_col and the new DBI bind_col attributes StrictlyTyped and DiscardString; from Martin J. Evans
• Added ora_ncs_buff_mtpl and environment var ORA_DBD_NCS_BUFFER so we can control the size of the buffer when doing nclob reads
• Fix for rt.cpan.org Ticket 49741, Oracle.h has commented out params in OCIXMLTypeCreateFromSrc; from Kartik Thakore
• Added from rt.cpan.org Ticket 49436, Patch to add support for a few Oracle data types to type_info_all; from David Hull
• Added from rt.cpan.org Ticket 49435, Patch to add support for a few Oracle data types to dbd_describe; from David Hull
• Fix for rt.cpan.org Ticket 49331, Bad code example in POD; from John Scoles
• Added support for looking up OCI_DTYPE_PARAM attributes
• Added support for looking up csform values
• Fix for rt.cpan.org Ticket 46763,46998, enhancement -Rowcache size is now being properly implemented with row fetch buffer; from John Scoles
• Fix for rt.cpan.org Ticket 46438, enhancement -Errors returned by procedures are now unicode strings; from Martin Evans, John Scoles, and Tim Bunce
• Fix for rt.cpan.org Ticket 47503, bugfix – using more than 1 LOB in insert broken; from APLA
• Fix for rt.cpan.org Ticket 46613, bugfix – sig-abort on nested objects with ora_objects=1; from TomasP
• Fix for rt.cpan.org Ticket 46661, DBD::Oracle hangs when insert/update with LOB and quoted table name; from APLA
• Fix for rt.cpan.org Ticket 46246, fetching from nested cursor (returned from procedure) leads to application crash (abort); from John Scoles
• Fix for rt.cpan.org Ticket 46016; LOBs bound with ora_field broken; from RKITOVER
• Fix for bug in 58object.t when test run as externally identified user; from Charles Jardine