Can I talk to an MS Access DB using Perl?

[Anonymous Monk]

Just want to do something simple, query Access DB and provide action from there, just want to know if this is possible

[dlc]

try installing DBD::ODBC, which you can get from CPAN. from the readme for version 0.22

Win32 ODBC drivers:
http://www.microsoft.com/support/products/backoffice/odbc/
Follow "Microsoft ODBC Desktop Database Drivers 3.5 For 32-Bit Programs"
and "ODBC Drivers for Win95 Applications".
For Access use version "Access ODBC driver 3.40.2111 27/03/96" or later.

[Anonymous Monk]

If your using Activestates Perl build for Windows, you can use Win32::ODBC. Its very easy, and was very robust for the project I did in it. www.roth.net has more information and a tutorial. It comes preloaded in recent activestate builds as well. _Drew

[Asim]

Here's two snippets of code to get you started, as well. I've been working on this very issue recently! The first connects using DBI::ADO, but works the same for DBI::ODBC with one caveat, as noted below. Also, I'm doing something fairly complex, with making a array of hashs holding the data. The docs for both modules can tell you how to get simpler forms of the data, if you wish:

use strict;
use DBI;

$| =1;

my @sites;
#This below can be changed to 'dbi:ODBC:<name>'
#provided you have DBI::ODBC installed
#I'm testing both, and have both installed
#They "feel" fairly interchangable
my $dbh = DBI->connect('dbi:ADO:Name', undef, undef, {PrintError => 1,
+ RaiseError => 1});

#The two lines below are for use with DBI::ODBC 
#with BLOB, aka MEMO fields with large amounts of data. 
#Look in the docs for the modules for more on them
#$dbh->{LongReadLen} = 65534;
#$dbh->{LongTruncOk} = 1;
my $sth = $dbh->prepare('SELECT * FROM tbldata');
$sth->execute;

#dump_results is very good for testing, 
#and even for simple apps -- you don't need to
#loop the results, just print out $results
#my $results = DBI::dump_results($sth);

#One of the nice things about DBI is the wide
#variety in gives you in retrieving data
while (my $results = $sth->fetchrow_hashref) {
    push @sites, $results;
}

Now for the Win32::ODBC version -- less commentary, as it's a little less flexible, but more obvious (IMHO):

use Win32::ODBC;

my @rows;

my $DSN = "Name";

if (!($db = new Win32::ODBC($DSN))){
    print "error connecting to $DSN\n";
    print "error: " . Win32::ODBC::Error() . "\n";
    exit;
}

die qq(SQL failed: ), $db->Error(), qq(\n) if ($db->Sql("SELECT * FROM
+ tbldata"));

while ($db->FetchRow()) {
    my %data = $db->DataHash();
    push @rows, {%data};
}

In general, I'd use DBI unless you have need of Win32::ODBC's features, but please look over both.

----Asim

Edited by footpad, ~Sun Jan 6 04:48:47 2002 (GMT): Added <CODE> and <P> tags.

[athomason]

No disrespect intended, but here's a cleaner version (same code as above, but within code tags).

use strict;
use DBI;

$| =1;

my @sites;
#This below can be changed to 'dbi:ODBC:<name>'
#provided you have DBI::ODBC installed
#I'm testing both, and have both installed
#They "feel" fairly interchangable
my $dbh = DBI->connect('dbi:ADO:Name', undef, undef, {PrintError => 1,
+ RaiseError => 1});

#The two lines below are for use with DBI::ODBC 
#with BLOB, aka MEMO fields with large amounts of data. 
#Look in the docs for the modules for more on them
#$dbh->{LongReadLen} = 65534;
#$dbh->{LongTruncOk} = 1;
my $sth = $dbh->prepare('SELECT * FROM tbldata');
$sth->execute;

#dump_results is very good for testing, 
#and even for simple apps -- you don't need to
#loop the results, just print out $results
#my $results = DBI::dump_results($sth);

#One of the nice things about DBI is the wide
#variety in gives you in retrieving data
while (my $results = $sth->fetchrow_hashref) {
    push @sites, $results;
}

====================================================
Now for the Win32::ODBC version -- less commentary, as it's a little l
+ess flexiable, but more obvious (IMHO):
use Win32::ODBC;

my @rows;

my $DSN = "Name";

if (!($db = new Win32::ODBC($DSN))){
    print "error connecting to $DSN\n";
    print "error: " . Win32::ODBC::Error() . "\n";
    exit;
}

die qq(SQL failed: ), $db->Error(), qq(\n) if ($db->Sql("SELECT * FROM
+ tbldata"));

while ($db->FetchRow()) {
    my %data = $db->DataHash();
    push @rows, {%data};
}

[Anonymous Monk]

I use the above code but the results prined from @rows...is like HASH(01b2b69c)..... & so on...instead of the the fields in the table....can u tell whts going wrong.