Yes, another release candidate! I think I've finally got to the bottom of the character set issues. (Thanks in part to Lincoln providing me with an account on a system with several test databases with different combinations of CHAR and NCHAR character sets. Thanks Lincoln.)
This release has been tested against four different server configs: US7ASCII/UTF8, US7ASCII/AL16UTF16 (the oracle default installation), UTF8/UTF8 (wide mode db), and UTF8/AL16UTF16. For *each* of those the entire test suite has been run with permutations of US7ASCII, UTF8/AL32UTF8, and WE8MSWIN1252 for NLS_LANG and NLS_NCHAR. All tests pass. (Perl 5.8.4 and Oracle 9.2 on Linux.) I've also tested on Perl 5.6.1 and Oracle 9.0.1. This release candidate is available for testing at: http://homepage.eircom.net/~timbunce/DBD-Oracle-1.16-rc8-20041019.tar.gz I'd be especially grateful for reports of testing of ... - a range of Oracle versions, especially 8.1.x and even 8.0.x - Windows, VMS and other less-common platforms - anyone who's has 32/64 bit build/link issues Thanks! Tim. =head1 Changes in DBD-Oracle 1.16 (svn rev 505) 19th October 2004 NOTE: This release has major changes to Unicode support. See below. It no longer supports the old Oracle 7 OCI interface. It requires DBI >= 1.38 for some of the tests if using Perl 5.6. It no longer supports Perl 5.5 or earlier. Fixed placeholder names to be case insensitive thanks to Charles Jardine. Fixed some LOB test problems with Oracle 8.1.7 by implementing ora_lob_append with OCILobGetLength() and OCILobWrite(), instead of buggy OCILobWriteAppend(), if the Oracle client version is < 9.0. Thanks to Jeff Urlwin. Fixed handling of temporary LOBs thanks to Chris Donnelly. Fixed memory leaks in auto LOB refetch code thanks to Dongqiang Bai. Fixed reporting of length truncated in error message thanks to Jeff Urlwin. Fixed column_info() to handle TIMESTAMP and INTERVAL datatypes for Oracle >= 8 thanks to Stephen Clouse. Fixed STORE to cache attribute value in handle cache. Fixed seg fault returning LOB Locators reported by Raj Chandran. Fixed binding to allow overloaded scalars (not for 'inout' params). Fixed setting of $DBI::err to 0 triggering PrintWarn in DBI >= 1.41. Fixed some edge cases in row cache sizing. Fixed truncation error fetching very small numbers (1 ^ -130). Fixed Oraperl to not enable PrintError or AutoCommit (broken since 1.13). Changed some utf8 internals for LOBs. Changed ORA_OCI constant from being just 7 or 8 to being a dualvar: in numeric context returns the major.minor version number (8.1, 9.2 etc) in string context it returns the full "major.minor.foo.bar" version string. Changed some SUCCESS_WITH_INFO situtions to be treated as a "warning" by setting $DBI::err to "0" (and so trigger PrintWarn in DBI >= 1.43) eg "ORA-28011: the account will expire soon; change your password now" and package compilation errors. Added automatic support for UTF-8 for both NLS_LANG and NLS_NCHAR Many thanks to Lincoln Baxter who did most of the hard work and testing and to Jeff Urlwin and others who also helped out. Perl 5.8.x and Oracle 9+ are highly recommended if you want to use Unicode. See POD for more information and documentation. Added support for "... RETURNING lob_locator_column INTO ?" using $sth->bind_param_inout(2, \$loc, 0, {ora_type => ORA_BLOB}); Added bind_param() ora_csform, ora_csid, and ora_maxdata_size attributes. Added bind_param() support for SQL_BLOB & SQL_CLOB thanks to Stephen Clouse. Added $dbh->ora_can_unicode and $dbh->ora_nls_parameters thanks to Andy Hassall. Documentation changes: Corrected typo in ora_lob_read() example thanks to Johannes Wierny. Corrected LOB example thanks to Sascha Pfalz and Thomas Upton. Updated README.macosx thanks to Hilmar Lapp. Added $dbh->reauthenticate($user,$pass) docs thanks to Andy Hassall. Added $dbh->{ora_parse_error_offset} docs thanks to Andy Hassall. Added gcc example to README.aix thanks to Adrian Terranova. Added INSERT ... RETURNING ... example prompted by Steven Lembark. Build Changes: Fixed build32/build64 Makefile.PL bug spotted by Sean Kelly. Fixed Oracle version detection on clients thanks to Marko Asplund. Fixed Oracle 10 version detection on clients thanks to Andy Hassall. Fixed HP-UX 64bit build issues thanks to Weiguo Sun. Fixed VMS build issues thanks to Jakob Snoer. Fixed suprious warning from Makefile.PL thanks to Marko Asplund. Fixed compiler warnings thanks to Robert Baron. Fixed oci.def for Cygwin by adding OCILobWriteAppend thanks to Gert-Jan Paulissen. Changed to use ANSI C prototypes thanks to Steffen Goeldner. Changed to not warn if ORACLE_HOME env var is not defined as it's not used with Oracle's new 'Instant Client'. Added Test::More as a prerequisite module. Added many Unicode related tests thanks to Lincoln Baxter. =cut
