Dan Sugalski wrote:
Having a fetchrow_hash that returned a Hash where the keys are the column names and the values are the column values would be most of the rest.
I read somewhere that accessing a hash was slightly slower than accessing and array which is one reason why I never used it. The other reason is that if I name the fileds in the hash then the user needs to know the names to access them or perform some magic to get them.
The names will be known--they are the column names (or aliases) used in the query.
With an array they come out in the order they are aksed for.
The nice thing about a hash (that I've found when using DBI) is that you don't have a problem if you end up inadvertently changing the order in which the columns are returned, when modifying a query.
Another reason not to use the hash method above is that you are moving column names around that will not change throughout the transaction (is this not more bulky than using arrays).
Hopefully the actual strings used as the keys can be re-used. (That is, each hash can use the same string instance for a given key. I believe that Perl5 does this for hash keys.)
JEff
