I wouldn't vote down a question related to SQL as long as it was in the context of a perl program. I view SQL questions much like I view regex related questions in the respect that regexen are applicable to many tools outside of perl.

I've spent a number of years as a *nix sysadmin and I've seen many bad CGI scripts cross my desk. The most common problems I see with CGI scripts are:

• the programmer did not use CGI.pm
• the programmer did not use strict and #!perl -wT
• the programmer used very inefficient or sloppy SQL

I can't tell you how many times I've seen a perl program come across my desk where the author used "SELECT * FROM some_table" and looped through thousands of rows to find a single value from a single column. So in summary, I don't have any problems with SQL related questions (or answers) in the monestary.

I will be interested to hear what others have to say on this matter, I've been thinking about doing a review for Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties: Advanced SQL Programming. The book has no perl code or mention of perl in it whatsoever, but it has been an invaluable tool for me in the context of perl, PHP, and VB development. I haven't done the review yet as I'm not sure if a review of a SQL book is appropriate on PM.

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Coyote

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