DBD::Oracle and Support for Oracle 8 and 9 clients

I just want to get a general feeling of the community on weather the next
version of DBD::Oracle (1.22) should drop support for the

Oracle 8 and
Oracle 9 clients

I was just reviewing the code today and there are a large number of little
fixes here and there to make these two clients work with later versions of
DBD::Oracle.

With the upcoming demise of Oracle support of 9i we will see a good number
of already deprecated functions removed from later OCI (12 maybe?)
releases.

So I was thinking of cleaning up the code so that the next version 1.22
only supports 9.6 and later clients?

The second option is to make version 1.22 the last version that support
clients less that 9.6 (actually I think some of the early versions of the
8 client will die with 1.21 so it would be more of a bug fix in this case)

Speak up now or hold your peace.

Basically what I would like to know who uses what clients.

Hi scoles,

i am already running DBD on all my old Oracle installations, upgrades
are not planned. Usually, i run DBD on the host where my Oracle is
installed, so no extra client is needed. For new oracle installations
(V10/V11) i will fetch a fresh DBD.

as to me, there is no more need to support Oracle V8/V9 in new DBD
releases. (Surely, the desupport will be outlined in the README...)

Thank you, Christian

scoles@pythian.com schrieb:
> I just want to get a general feeling of the community on weather the next
> version of DBD::Oracle (1.22) should drop support for the
>
> Oracle 8 and
> Oracle 9 clients
>
> I was just reviewing the code today and there are a large number of little
> fixes here and there to make these two clients work with later versions of
> DBD::Oracle.
>
> With the upcoming demise of Oracle support of 9i we will see a good number
> of already deprecated functions removed from later OCI (12 maybe?)
> releases.
>
> So I was thinking of cleaning up the code so that the next version 1.22
> only supports 9.6 and later clients?
>
> The second option is to make version 1.22 the last version that support
> clients less that 9.6 (actually I think some of the early versions of the
> 8 client will die with 1.21 so it would be more of a bug fix in this case)
>
> Speak up now or hold your peace.
>
> Basically what I would like to know who uses what clients.
>

On 2008-04-17 21:43:27 -0400, scoles@pythian.com wrote:
> I just want to get a general feeling of the community on weather the next
> version of DBD::Oracle (1.22) should drop support for the
> 
> Oracle 8 and
> Oracle 9 clients
> 
> I was just reviewing the code today and there are a large number of little
> fixes here and there to make these two clients work with later versions of
> DBD::Oracle.

We still have some 8i databases, but since they can be accessed with an
Oracle 10 client[0], that's not a problem. If I have a reason to upgrade to
a newer DBD::Oracle on a machine I can just install a version 10 client
there, too.

> So I was thinking of cleaning up the code so that the next version 1.22
> only supports 9.6 and later clients?

Go ahead.

hp

[0] Not just theoretically. I do have a number of perl scripts using a
version 10 client which access one of the old 8i databases.
Sometimes things are a bit weird (especially with UTF-8), but it
works.

-- 
_  | Peter J. Holzer    | If I wanted to be "academically correct",
|_|_) | Symin WSR       | I'd be programming in Java.
| |   | hjp@wsr.ac.at      | I don't, and I'm not.
__/   | http://www.hjp.at/ |   -- Jesse Erlbaum on dbi-users

10g here on Widders, HPUX, and SUN.  No more 8 or 9

• '•..• '•. ><((((º> .• '•. .• '•. •. .• '•. ><((((º
>
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scoles@pythian.com 
04/17/2008 09:43 PM

To
dbi-users@perl.org
cc

Subject
DBD::Oracle and  Support for Oracle 8 and 9 clients






I just want to get a general feeling of the community on weather the next
version of DBD::Oracle (1.22) should drop support for the

Oracle 8 and
Oracle 9 clients

I was just reviewing the code today and there are a large number of little
fixes here and there to make these two clients work with later versions of
DBD::Oracle.

With the upcoming demise of Oracle support of 9i we will see a good number
of already deprecated functions removed from later OCI (12 maybe?)
releases.

So I was thinking of cleaning up the code so that the next version 1.22
only supports 9.6 and later clients?

The second option is to make version 1.22 the last version that support
clients less that 9.6 (actually I think some of the early versions of the
8 client will die with 1.21 so it would be more of a bug fix in this case)

Speak up now or hold your peace.

Basically what I would like to know who uses what clients.

On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 21:43 -0400, scoles@pythian.com wrote:
> I just want to get a general feeling of the community on weather the next
> version of DBD::Oracle (1.22) should drop support for the
>
> Oracle 8 and
> Oracle 9 clients

Though personally I no longer have an 7.x databases to work with,
there may be some here that do.

Oracle 9 clients can still connect to 7.x databases, while 10g cannot.

Though anyone really needed to do this could probably find a workaround.

Jared

Well looking at this thread and talking with a number of other community
members I think we will keep 9 support for now but drop direct support of
8 going forward.

I will announce this on a few more forms before I commit this change though.

Cheers and Thanks for you opinions

John Scoles