2009/6/4 Joe Atzberger <joe.atzberger@liblime.com>
Kohackers --
I want to mention this because I've seen a lot of recent patches still using the old style of code calling $sth->finish() explicitly. I know a lot of the codebase still does this internally, but for Koha such usage is almost always wrong.
If this were just my personal contention, I would couch this in terms of an RFC to deprecate the usage. But we don't get a choice here: DBI is telling us "don't do it".
Please refer to the DBI perldoc<http://search.cpan.org/%7Etimb/DBI-1.608/DBI.pm#finish> :
The finish method is rarely needed, and frequently overused, but can sometimes be helpful in a few very specific situations to allow the server to free up resources (such as sort buffers).
When all the data has been fetched from a SELECT statement, the driver should automatically call finish for you. So you should *not* normally need to call it explicitly *except* when you know that you've not fetched all the data from a statement handle. The most common example is when you only want to fetch one row, but in that case the selectrow_* methods are usually better anyway. *Adding calls to finish after each fetch loop is a common mistake, don't do it, it can mask genuine problems like uncaught fetch errors.* That last sentence is the most concrete and important (hence my bolding). Moral of the story: don't do it. Or if you think you have to, at least comment why, like: $sth->finish(); # FIXME: leaving data unfetched, should rework query
-- Joe Atzberger LibLime - Open Source Library Solutions
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I've wondered about this myself, since Perl, being a dynamic language, should have some sort of destructor support. Thanks for looking into this, I'll try to avoid it in the future. -- Jesse Weaver