Nice story, and so much to compare.

I started out with perl4.036. perl5.001m was just out and all articles I found referred to the need to upgrade, but as a company we only had dial-in internet connection which was allowed just for mail and vital system patches. So I was allowed to order the perl4 CD from a company in the US. I built perl4 for HP-UX 7 and soon after started to integrate Unify database support into it - after reading that Oracle and Sybase already managed to do so.

My colleages soon got enthousiastic, as we now did not have to write C programs anymore, but could - with some restrictions - write perl to access the databases and convert data from various sources into Unify and make quick selections into hashes. Wow, what a relief.

After perl5 got mainstream, I waited 7 years hoping someone else would write DBD::Unify, as I did see that DBI was the way forward. We kept using uniperl all those years.

Then I grabbed all existing DBD drivers and compared what approaches were available and how I could copy the work Tim and people like you did on the already existing DBD's and wrote DBD::Unify. I still maintain it, and we use it in the company every day, multiple times a day, but we are also moving away from Unify, as their support sucks and PostgreSQL has a mature relational database by now that is capable to replace Unify without losing too much functionality. Our focus really shifted over the years. In perl4 era it was just Unify. Now our main databases reach from PostgreSQL through Oracle to plain CSV files or SQLite storage.

Perl certainly enabled me to widen my database knowledge.