DBI is a database access module for the Perl programming language. It defines a set of methods, variables, and conventions that provide a consistent database interface, independent of the actual database being used. For the equivalent R package, use the tag r-dbi.
When Perl code needs access to a relational database, it usually accomplishes this by using the DBI CPAN module.
DBI's role is similar to that of JDBC for Java, or ODBC, in that it provides a set of common functions, classes and methods used to talk to databases, with a collection of specific backend implementations known as DBI drivers that implement this for particular types of database systems.
These drivers are modules with a name that starts with DBD::.
Many such modules are available on CPAN; popular ones include:
- DBD::Oracle
- DBD::mysql
- DBD::Pg, for PostgreSQL
- DBD::ODBC
- DBD::SQLite
- DBD::CSV, which supports limited SQL access to collections of CSV files
Unrelated tags
Please re-tag questions about the R package for database access with the tag r-dbi.
