To add a bit more substance to that—the "Protobuf thing" is actually a reality now. I recently shipped Protobuf (0.04) to CPAN, which brings Google's native upb (Micro Protocol Buffers) C engine into the Perl ecosystem via XS.
Because both BigQuery and Spanner heavily rely on gRPC and HTTP/2 binary streams for high-throughput data transfer, they represent a fundamentally different architectural paradigm than traditional relational databases. Instead of the classic "blocking pull" row-by-row approach, we are looking at server-pushed asynchronous streams. Since the team is looking to "update to reality" on the contributing front, I'd love to know if there's any appetite for discussing structural updates to the DBI specification itself. Specifically, exploring what first-class async/stream-oriented primitives (like native Promise/Future support or push-based row iteration) might look like for a DBI vNext. It would give modern cloud-native drivers a standard interface to target, rather than everyone hacking their own custom event loops into individual DBDs. Thoughts? Cheers, C.J. On Thu, Jul 9, 2026, 22:29 C.J. Collier <[email protected]> wrote: > Oh hey! I've been thinking about you all recently! I think I might try > to implement DBI for BigQuery and Spanner if this Protobuf thing works out. > > On Thu, Jul 9, 2026, 22:28 Daniël van Eeden <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> Pong. >> Yes, seems to be alive. >> >> On July 10, 2026 06:48:01 "H.Merijn Brand" via dbi-users < >> [email protected]> wrote: >> >> Just checking to see if this ML is still alive >>> >>> Working on DBI's CONTRIBUTING.md, we (the team) want to update to reality >>> >>> -- >>> H.Merijn Brand https://tux.nl Perl Monger http://amsterdam.pm.org/ >>> using perl5.00307 .. 5.37 porting perl5 on HP-UX, AIX, and Linux >>> https://tux.nl/email.html http://qa.perl.org https://www.test-smoke.org >>> >> >>
