Re: Storing Objects in a Database

[btrott]

Have you looked at Storable? It may help you.

It can store objects to the filesystem or to memory, then retrieve them, transforming them back into objects.

So perhaps you could freeze the object to a scalar, store it in a blob in your database, pull it back out, thaw it, then use it again? I don't know--I've only tested Storable using the filesystem, but it seems logical that you could do the same thing w/ a database.

You might be able to do something like this (untested):

use Storable qw/freeze thaw/;
use DBI;
use Foo;    # replace this with your module name

my $object = new Foo;

my $dbh = DBI->connect('bar', 'foo', 'foo', 'Oracle')
    or die "Can't connect: ", DBI->errstr;

# store it
my $sth = $dbh->prepare(<<SQL) or die "Can't prepare: ", $dbh->errstr;
insert into objects (id, content)
values (?, ?)
SQL

$sth->execute("foo", freeze $object)
    or die "Can't execute: ", $dbh->errstr;

$sth->finish;


# now get it back
my $retrieve = $dbh->prepare(<<SQL) or die "Can't prepare: ", $dbh->er
+rstr;
select content
from objects
where id = ?
SQL

$retrieve->execute("foo");
my $content = $retrieve->fetchrow;

my $unthawed = thaw $content;

...and now use $unthawed just as you would your original object.

Does this sound like what you want?

[chromatic]

Yes, that sounds very good. In my initial perusal of the docpage, I didn't think about using freeze and thaw with DBI. Thank you very much!