After much gnashing of teeth, heated arguments with @robkinon and @mst, lots of deep thesaurus spelunking, and three or four iterations, I finally came up with an an improved API for DBIx::Connector that I believe is straight-forward and easy to explain.

Following up on my post last week, I explored, oh I dunno, a hundred different terms for the various methods? I’ve never spent so much time on thesaurus.com in my life. Part of what added to the difficulty was that @mst seemed to think that there should actually be three modes for each block method: one that pings, one that doesn’t, and one that tries again if a block dies and the connection is down. So I went from six to nine methods with that assertion.

What I finally came up with was to name the three basic methods run(), txn_run(), and svp_run(), and these would neither ping nor retry in the event of failure. Then I added variations on these methods that would ping and that would try to fix failures. I called these “ping runs” and “fixup runs,” respectively. It was the latter term, “fixup,” that had been so hard for me to nail down, as “retry” seemed to say that the method was a retry, while “fixup” more accurately reflects that the method would try to fix up the connection in the event of a failure.

Once I’d implemented this interface, I now had nine methods:

• run()
• txn_run()
• svp_run()
• ping_run()
• txn_ping_run()
• svp_ping_run()
• fixup_run()
• txn_fixup_run()
• svp_fixup_run()

This worked great. Then I went about documenting it. Jesus Christ what a pain! I realized that all these similarly-named methods would require a lot of explanation. I duly wrote up said explanation, and just wasn’t happy with it. It just felt to me like all the explanation made it too difficult to decide what methods to use and when. Such confusion would make the module less likely to be used – and certainly less likely to be used efficiently.

So I went back to the API drawing board and, reflecting on @robkinyon’s browbeating about decorating methods and @mst’s coming to that conclusion as well, I finally came up with just three methods:

• run()
• txn()
• svp()

For any one of these, you can call it by passing a block, of course:

$conn->txn( sub { $_->do('SELECT some_function()') } );

In addition, you can now have any one of them run in one of three modes: the default (no ping), “ping”, or “fixup”:

$conn->txn( fixup => sub { $_->do('SELECT some_function()') } );

It’s much easier to explain the three methods in terms of how the block is transactionally encapsulated, as that’s the only difference between them. Once that’s understood, it’s pretty easy to explain how to change the “connection mode” of each by passing in a leading string. It even looks pretty nice. I’m really happy with this

One thing that increased the difficulty in coming up with this API was that @mst felt that by default the methods should neither ping nor try to fix up a failure. I was resistant to this because it’s not how Apache::DBI or connect_cached() work: they always ping. It turns out that DBIx::Class doesn’t cache connections at all. I thought it had. Rather, it creates a connection and simply hangs onto it as a scalar variable. It handles the connection for as long as it’s in scope, but includes no magic global caching. This reduces the action-at-a-distance issues common with caching while maintaining proper fork- and thread-safety.

At this point, I took a baseball bat to my desk.

Figuratively, anyway. I did at least unleash a mountain of curses upon @mst and various family relations. Because it took me a few minutes to see it: It turns out that DBIx::Class is right to do it this way. So I ripped out the global caching from DBIx::Connector, and suddenly it made much more sense not to ping by default – just as you wouldn’t ping if you created a DBI handle yourself.

DBIx::Connector is no longer a caching layer over the DBI. It’s now a proxy for a connection. That’s it. There is no magic, no implicit behavior, so it’s easier to use. And because it ensures fork- and thread-safety, you can instantiate a connector and hold onto it for whenever you need it, unlike using the DBI itself.

And one more thing: I also added a new method, with(). For those who always want to use the same connection mode, you can use this method to create a proxy object that has a different default mode. (Yes, a proxy for a proxy for a database handle. Whatever!) Use it like this:

$conn->with('fixup')->run( sub { ... } );

And if you always want to use the same mode, hold onto the proxy instead of the connection object:

my $proxy = DBIx::Connector->(@args)->with('fixup');

# later ...
$proxy->txn( sub { ... } ); # always in fixup mode

So while fixup mode is no longer the default, as Tim requested, but it can optionally be made the default, as DBIx::Class requires. The with() method will also be the place to add other global behavioral modifications, such as DBIx::Class’s auto_savepoint feature.

So for those of you who were interested in the first iteration of this module, my apologies for changing things so dramatically in this release (ripping out the global caching, deprecating methods, adding a new block method API, etc.). But I think that, for all the pain I went through to come up with the new API – all the arguing on IRC, all the thesaurus spelunking – that this is a really good API, easy to explain and understand, and easy to use. And I don’t expect to change it again. I might improve exceptions (use objects instead of strings?) add block method exception handling (perhaps adding a catch keyword?), but the basics are finally nailed down and here to stay.

Thanks to @mst, @robkinyon, and @ribasushi, in particular, for bearing with me and continuing to hammer on me when I was being dense.

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As part of my ongoing effort to wrestle Catalyst into working the way that I think it should work, I’ve just uploaded DBIx::Connector to the CPAN. See, I was using Catalyst::Model::DBI, but it turned out that I wanted to use the database handle in places other than the Catalyst parts of my app. I was bitching about this to mst on #catalyst, and he said that Catalyst::Model::DBI was actually a fork of DBIx::Class’s handle caching, and quite out of date. I said, “But this already exists. It’s called connect_cached().” I believe his response was, “OH FUCK OFF!”

So I started digging into what Catalyst::Model::DBI and DBIx::Class do to cache their database handles, and how it differs from connect_cached(). It turns out that they were pretty smart, in terms of checking to see if the process had forked or a new thread had been spawned, and if so, deactivating the old handle and then returning a new one. Otherwise, things are just cached. This approach works well in Web environments, including under mod_perl; in forking applications, like POE apps; and in plain Perl scripts. Matt said he’d always wanted to pull that functionality out of DBIx::Class and then make DBIx::Class depend on the external implementation. That way everyone could take advantage of the functionality, including people like me who don’t want to use an ORM.

So I did it. Maybe it was crazy (mmmmm…yak meat), but I can now use the same database interface in the Catalyst and POE parts of my application without worry:

my $dbh = DBIx::Connector->connect(
    'dbi:Pg:dbname=circle', 'postgres', '', {
        PrintError     => 0,
        RaiseError     => 0,
        AutoCommit     => 1,
        HandleError    => Exception::Class::DBI->handler,
        pg_enable_utf8 => 1,
    },
);

$dbh->do($sql);

But it’s not just database handle caching that I’ve included in DBIx::Connector; no, I’ve also stolen some of the transaction management stuff from DBIx::Class. All you have to do is grab the connector object which encapsulates the database handle, and take advantage of its txn_do() method:

my $conn = DBIx::Connector->new(@args);
$conn->txn_do(sub {
    my $dbh = shift;
    $dbh->do($_) for @queries;
});

The transaction is scoped to the code reference passed to txn_do(). Not only that, it avoids the overhead of calling ping() on the database handle unless something goes wrong. Most of the time, nothing goes wrong, the database is there, so you can proceed accordingly. If it is gone, however, txn_do() will re-connect and execute the code reference again. The cool think is that you will never notice that the connection was dropped – unless it’s still gone after the second execution of the code reference.

And finally, thanks to some pushback from mst, ribasushi, and others, I added savepoint support. It’s a little different than that provided by DBIx::Class; instead of relying on a magical auto_savepoint attribute that subtly changes the behavior of txn_do(), you just use the svp_do() method from within txn_do(). The scoping of subtransactions is thus nicely explicit:

$conn->txn_do(sub {
    my $dbh = shift;
    $dbh->do('INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (1)');
    eval {
        $conn->svp_do(sub {
            shift->do('INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (2)');
            die 'OMGWTF?';
        });
    };
    warn "Savepoint failed\n" if $@;
    $dbh->do('INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (3)');
});

This transaction will insert the values 1 and 3, but not 2. If you call svp_do() outside of txn_do(), it will call txn_do() for you, with the savepoint scoped to the entire transaction:

$conn->svp_do(sub {
    my $dbh = shift;
    $dbh->do('INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (4)');
    $conn->svp_do(sub {
        shift->do('INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (5)');
    });
});

This transaction will insert both 3 and 4. And note that you can nest savepoints as deeply as you like. All this is dependent on whether the database supports savepoints; so far, PostgreSQL, MySQL (InnoDB), Oracle, MSSQL, and SQLite do. If you know of others, fork the repository, commit changes to a branch, and send me a pull request!

Overall I’m very happy with this module, and I’ll probably use it in all my Perl database projects from here on in. Perhaps later I’ll build a model class on it (something like Catalyst::Model::DBI, only better!), but next up, I plan to finish documenting Template::Declare and writing some views with it. More on that soon.

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