From: nolan@notes.tssi.com (Michael Nolan) Newsgroups: comp.databases.oracle Subject: Oraperl change needed for V7 CHAR/VARCHAR2 DDL Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1993 16:37:49 GMT Organization: Cliffs Notes, Inc. Lines: 47 Message-ID: I've discovered at least one change that needs to be made to oraperl in order to produce the expected results on an Oracle 7 database. The change deals with DDL involving the CHAR and VARCHAR2 fields. In V7, CHAR is an ANSI-compliant fixed length field, VARCHAR2 is now used for variable length fields which were CHAR in V6. As a result, tables defined in oraperl using CHAR fields will come out as VARCHAR2 unless a change is made to the orafns.c module. I haven't set this up as a full patch, in part because there may be additional changes. (Also, I'm not quite prepared to assume the task of maintaining oraperl.) Ideally this should be a configurable parameter, or maybe more than one parameter, to select V7 functionality and options. In the section dealing with the ora_open function in orafns.c, around line 242, locate the following: || (osql3(csr->csr, stmt, -1) != 0) I changed it to the following: || (oparse(csr->csr, stmt, -1, 1, 2) != 0) ^ The indicated parameter determines whether you get Version 6 or Version 7 behavior. From page 4-70 of the Programmers Guide to the OCI's for V7: 0 - Version 6 behavior (CHAR becomes VARCHAR2) 1 - Version 6 or 7 behavior, depending on what you're connected to 2 - Version 7 behavior (will fail if used while connected to V6.) The oparse call replaces the osql3 call in V7, this appears to be the only time it is referenced in oraperl. The '1' parameter deals with applications linked in deferred mode. (See page 4-69 for explanation, it's still greek to me.) I've not tested this with a V6 database yet (I'm running V7, which is why I used the value of 2 above), and I'm not sure whether there are other areas of oraperl that will need to be similarly modified to deal with the differences betweeh CHAR and VARCHAR2. I'm also not sure whether '1' or '2' is the better choice in general. --- Michael Nolan, Tailored Software Services, Inc. Lincoln, Nebraska Sysop for the GEnie DBMS RoundTable nolan@notes.tssi.com, dbms@genie.geis.com