MySQL and Perl have been around for quite a while. They are still widely used even if the “fashion” is changing. This article talks about these two products working together as a whole, either on the Internet or on your local network. The provided example is written for Unix systems, free or not, even if it can be adapted to other widespread “systems”.

What this article is : a small review of what can be done with this pair, showing ease of use, speed, reliability, security…
What this article is not : neither a MySQL tutorial nor a Perl tutorial; neither a MySQL review nor a Perl review.
Accordingly, we’ll see MySQL at work in combination with Perl, without forgetting that “there is more than one way to do it”.

What about this nice pair ?
MySQL is a Relational DataBase Management System (RDBMS) available from http://www.mysql.com. It’s released under GNU GPL for free depending on what it is used for. Check the licensing policy on the MySQL’s website. It works either as a server or a client on many platforms. A few other RDBMS exist as free software and we won’t make any comparisons since the choice of MySQL for this article is arbitrary. Neither will we compare to the big “commercial” guns such as Informix, Oracle, Sybase… It is enough to say that MySQL is probably one of the most widely used DBM on the Internet. For this article we’ll use the version 3.23.36 (again, arbitrarily). At the time of this writing, the current stable version is 3.23.46 and the experimental one is the long awaited version 4.0. These can be downloaded as source code to be compiled or as packages.
To use MySQL in conjunction with Perl, you need some more stuff : the Perl DBI modules. At least, you can download DBI, Msql-Mysql-modules, Data-Dumper and Data-ShowTable.

Download pdf MySQL and Perl, the marriage of convenience