The name Buzz Moschetti probably isn’t familiar to you. Buzz was the author of the Perl 4 database for Interbase known as Interperl.

Back in those days Perl 5 was barely a twinkle in Larry’s eye and database interfaces for Perl 4 required building a custom perl binary.

Buzz was one of the four people to get the email on September 29th 1992 from Ted Lemon that started the perldb-interest project which defined a specification that ultimately lead to the DBI. (The other people were Kurt Andersen re informix, Kevin Stock re oraperl, and Michael Peppler re sybperl. I joined a few days later.)

Update: It turns out that it was actually Buzz who sent that original email, Ted just forwarded it on to others, including me. So Buzz can be said to have started the process that led to the DBI!

I hadn’t heard from Buzz for many years until he sent me an email recently.

This is his story:

Thought I’d share a quick story with you.

Recently, I was frustrated with a development team’s efforts in putting together some DB-oriented reconciliations. The candidate solution was a blend of precompiled SQL in COBOL code, file dumps and ftps, programs to read files, more programs to read other DBs, etc. etc. Not only was the process orchestration a project in its own right, the end-to-end logic required to accurately perform the reconciliation was distributed across several programs and platforms, diluting the knowledge base. I knew a perl program using multiple DBD drivers to different DB engines could do it in a much cleaner way, but over the years my job has changed and although I still use perl regularly, I don’t do much in the way of DBD/DBI. To make matters worse, one of the targets was mainframe DB2 and very little work had been done here with DBD::DB2. Also, the Sybperl module continues to be heavily used in addition to DBD::Sybase, so local DBD/DBI expertise in general is thin. I decided to get it working on my own.

The infrastructure team spun up for me a Linux virtual machine with a modern build environment on it. This had the latest gcc compilers and a firm-approved build of perl 5.8.5 right out of the box. It took a few days of low-priority requests to get the appropriate 32bit Linux client-side SDKs for the DB2 and Sybase products but soon enough I had an environment set up with headers and shared libs. I was ready to build some perl modules, something I haven’t done in years.

I went to CPAN and downloaded DBD::DB2, untar’d it, and ran perl Makefile.PL and make. Everything worked perfectly and the whole exercise took minutes. ‘make test’ sets PERL_DL_NONLAZY and warned of some unused symbols not being found, but that was OK. The rest of the tests that I expected to work with my level of permissions worked fine. ‘make install’ worked perfectly. Buoyed by this success, I wrote a 4-liner test program just to connect and fetch some data from a table I knew about. Outside of the test environment, however, the shared libs for DB2 were not found so I cheated and relinked and reinstalled DB2.so with the -Wl,-rpath option to “cement in” the location of those libs so I wouldn’t have to fuss with LD_LIBRARY_PATH. My test program now worked fine. Newly comfortable with the process, I downloaded DBD::Sybase and built and installed the module in scarcely more time than it took for the compiler to run. In my excitement I skipped over the DBD::Sybase 4-liner test program and went straight to a slightly bigger script that used both modules and grabbed data from both DBs. It quietly and quickly executed.

Total time from initial download with almost no clues to a running example: about 40 minutes. Later, for grin’s sake, I threw in DBD::Oracle for good measure. That went even faster — about 5 minutes — from CPAN download to printing “Oracle connected!” because I was more familiar with the connection string syntax that is bespoke for each engine.

As I watched the program run, it made me reflect on how far we’ve come and how easy yet sophisticated the perl module ecosystem has become. There is no question that this multi-DBD perl program is easier to understand and support than a solution involving a set of disconnected programs, platforms, and files. But I think it is the organization and design of the resources as a whole — DBI, DBD, CPAN, MakeMaker, pod, binary and non-binary library locations, etc. — that makes the whole environment so clear, symmetric, and easy to use with confidence. I think back to the build environment that I used to create interperl, and the progress that has been made in terms of both breadth of module functionality and depth of framework for module build portability is simply amazing. Perl has grown far beyond just being another language. It has a value proposition as an able integrator of widely disparate functionality.

I exited the Perl mainstream some time ago but I am watching from the side and I applaud the work you’ve done in this space.

Take care.

Thanks Buzz!