Where We Stand

By now you've learned how to construct a basic SQL statement, pass it to your database with Perl, and receive the results. That's 90% of the ballgame. As we've noted several times, this article has focused on Microsoft Access, and there are a few -- very few -- different twists in using these techniques in a Unix environment. Next month we'll look at the popular Unix-friendly MySQL database.

You may have noticed that our examples have so far been oriented solely towards reading data from a database. This is probably the goal of most readers and is certainly the easiest and safest interaction. Sometimes, though, you might wish to use Perl to write data to a database, either adding new records or updating existing ones. Here things become slightly tricker, as we must be concerned with safety -- both security and data integrity -- a topic we'll focus on later in this series on using Perl with databases.

Resources

James Hoffman's Introduction to Structured Query Language

SQL Reference Page

DBI Module Documentation

DBI Frequently Asked Questions

Selena Sol's Introduction to Databases on the Web

VL-WWW: Database : Authoring

VL-WWW: Database : Software

Ask the SQL Server Pro