DBD::MariaDB

Why?

There’s DBD::mysql already!

Because

• Security issues (SSL problems)
• Broken Unicode support
• Placeholders, support for new client versions, plus many more…

Security issues

• Real vulnerabilities with names, logos, and pages!
  • BAKRONYM
  • Riddle
• DBD::MariaDB refuses to connect using vulnerable client library when SSL is required.

Unicode support

In mysql, you can specify

• the server encoding
• encoding of the default database
• encoding of the statement sent by the client
• encoding to translate an incoming statement to
• encoding of the result sent to the client
• encoding for a particular table
• encoding for a particular column…

Unicode support (2)

• utf8 in mysql is 3-byte, to use all 4 bytes, use utf8mb4
• Previously, Latin-1 was the default, now UTF-8 if possible, otherwise the 3-byte UTF-8
• UTF-8 support for placeholders was broken: SET NAMES utf8 needs to be followed by a call to mysql_set_character_set() function in C which was missing

Unicode support (3)

• By default, DBD::MariaDB uses Perl Unicode characters.
• Originally, just a patch to DBD::mysql, but old code depending on old buggy behaviour might not work with the fixed driver.
  Backlash of legacy code maintainers ⇒ we forked the driver.

It took half a year to prepare a version ready for CPAN

For example: Parsing numbers in SQL statements

Testing in Travis-ci.org

137 different combinations of Perl, client, and server versions

Thanks to

• Pali
  • for writing the code
• GoodData
  • for sponsoring Open Source

BTW, we are hiring!