Lunch is over and I’m sitting in the first of two mid-afternoon sessions I’ve chosen on Perl technologies. The first one with Tim Bunce, the extremely knowledgeable author of DBI. He’s presenting DBD::Gofer, a stateless proxy driver for DBI.

This session is very much like other sessions I’ve attended. It’s essentially a brain dump of as many features Tim can squeeze into the alloted time as possible. It’s almost too much to follow. It’s certainly too much to take notes. Fortunately, he’s told us the slides will be available on-line.

From the description of the session, I had hoped DBD::Gofer would scratch an itch we have at work. Essentially, we need to ensure data finds its way into a database, even if the database may not be available. We have a custom solution at the moment, but it would be great if we could replace it with a packaged, maintained module. However, it appears that, while DBD::Gofer makes an excellent proxy, it wouldn’t fit our needs.

Examples have included connection pooling and load balancing, often to reduce load on the main database server. It’s apparent from the use cases that this module was developed for use by heavily trafficked web sites (its development was sponsored by Shopzilla.com). It’s design is modular, so perhaps it can be extended to do what we want. I won’t know until I’ve had a chance to look at the distribution.

Some interesting things for the future are HTTP caching and JSON, effectively turning DBI into a web service. This is cool. I can see this opening up a lot of possibilities as more applications are constructed from individual services, complete in their own right.