History Win32::SqlServer

2008-05-04 – 2.004

The big thing for this release is support for new features in SQL 2008, detailed below. At the time, SQL 2008 is still in beta, RTM is scheduled for Q3 of 2008. Thus I need to add the caveat that there may be issues with Win32::SqlServer 2.004 and the RTM release. Rest assured that I will monitor this, and relase a new version of Win32::SqlServer if required.

Another big thing is support for Perl 5.10; Win32::SqlServer now ships with binaries for ActiveState builds 10xx.

Changes for SQL 2008:

To have full access to these features, you need to use SQLNCLI10 provider that ships with SQL 2008. Win32::SqlServer will use this provider by default if it is installed.

• Table-valued parameters. See the section Working with Table Variables for details for the high-level interface. For the mid-level interface there are two new routines: definetablecolumn() and inserttableparam().
• The new data types date, time, datetime2 and datetimeoffset. See the section Date and Time Data Ttypes. There are some incompatibilities in that Win32::SqlServer previous silently accepted if there was garbage at the end of an ISO-formatted date string. Not so any more.
• FILESTREAM: Win32::SqlServer provides access to the OpenSqlFilesteam() API, so that you can access FILESTREAM columns using Win32::API functions ReadFile and WriteFile.
• Support for large UDTs, that is UDTs that can exceed 8000 bytes in size.
• The new built-in CLR types hierarchyid, geometry and geography are recognised, but apart from the name, Win32::SqlServer has no particular support for these; they are handled as any other CLR UDT.

Other changes and bugfixes:

• Behvaiour change: previously if you declared a varchar/nvarbinar/varbinary parameter to sql() without specifying the length, for instance ['nvarchar', $value], Win32::SqlServer would infer the length of the value of the parameter. This has been changed, so that Win32::SqlServer now uses the maximum value, that is 8000 for varbinary and varchar and 4000 for nvarchar. If the value exceeds this length, Win32::SqlServer uses MAX. The reason for this change is that the parameter list is part of the statement that is in SQL Server's plan cache. By using a consistent parameter length, Win32::SqlServer reduces the cache bloat. For char/nchar/binary, Win32::SqlServer still infers the length from the actual value when none is explicitly provided, but now issues a warning to inform you that this is not good practice.
• The variables $Win32:SqlServer::VERSION and $Win32::SqlServer::Version are now documented.
• Bugfix: character-set conversion did not work when there was no default handle. (Which there isn't if you connect with setloginproperty() and connect() rather than sql_init().)
• Despite that the manual said that you could use rowversion as an alternative to timestamp, this was not the case. This has been corrected.
• Bugfix: the check for duplicate column names in the result set was broken.
• The export tag :consts did not include the constants for command states.
• Consistent behaviour when you pass an empty command batch. No matter if you pass undef, an empty string or a string of blanks, the batch is accepted without errors. In 2.003, you got an error for undef and an empty string, but not for a string with or more spaces.
• If you call a Win32::SqlServer routine without specifying a handle, and there is no default handle, you will now get a clear error message up front. The next version of Win32::SqlServer will probnbly warn you rely on the default handle, as this is a deprecated feature.

To build Win32::SqlServer from sources, you now need Visual Studio 2005 (or the .Net 2.0 SDK), and the SDK for SQL Server Native Client 10 that ships with SQL 2008. See the README for the source distribution for further details.

2007-07-11 – 2.003

• Win32::SqlServer now runs on AMD64. In lieu of hardware to test on, IA64 is still unsupported. Note that the bigint data type is handled differently on 64-bit.
• Added a mid-level routine getcoluminfo() that returns information about the columns in the result set(s).
• Added a new parameter to sql() and sql_sp(), $colinfostyle, that permits you to specify that you want information about the columns in the result set included in the return structure. You can opt get only names, only position, or get a hash with detail information.
• Added a new result style, MULTISET_RC, that is very similar to MULTISET, but which has row counts instead of  empty arrays for INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE statements.
• Re-implemented the conversion initiated by sql_set_conversion() to use the Windows API, rather than relying on certain files being available in System32. This makes about any code-page conversion accessible from Win32::SqlServer. There is a new routine, codepage_convert(), to convert a single value.
• sql_init() now has a fifth parameter, $provider.
• Fixed bug that caused a crash on Vista when an sql_variant value had certain base types.

2006-04-17 – 2.002

Fixed two problems which prevented Win32::SqlServer to run under ASP:

• In the binary distribution, the C run-time is now statically linked with the SqlServer.dll, because ASP did not pick up MSVCR70.DLL when it was only in the same directory as SqlServer.dll. (Workaround was to put MSVCR70 in System32.)
• Fixed a problem caused an ASP page with Win32::SqlServer to fail on second and succeeding invocations.

2005-11-27 – 2.001

Renamed the module to Win32::SqlServer from the original name MSSQL::OlleDB to comply with requirements from the maintainers of the Perl module list (and because the original name was more cute than practical). No other changes.

2005-11-13 – 2.000

This is the first release of MSSQL::OlleDB. It has version number 2.000 since it is a successor module to MSSQL::Sqllib.