From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2004-10-26T22:14:30+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] Apache::DBI 0.0.20041025b

>   [foo.rbx]
>     require 'dbi'
>     $dbh ||= DBI.connect('dbi:Pg:foo',...)
> 
>   [bar.rbx]
>     require 'dbi'
>     $dbh ||= DBI.connect('dbi:Pg:bar',...)
> 
> $dbh conflicts. This is not cool way.

Well OK, but if you can't choose a unique global variable name, you could
instead write

  module ::MyPrivateStuff
    def self.dbh
      @dbh ||= DBI.connect('dbi:Pg:foo',...)
    end
  end
  dbh = ::MyPrivateStuff.dbh

> Apache::DBI's advantage is transparent & simple.

I'm guessing now. Does your module keep a separate database instance for
each unique value of the DBI string? Or each unique combination of all the
arguments inside DBI.connect(...) ?

In other words, does it do something like

  $dbh ||= {}
  $dbh['dbi:Pg:bar'] ||= DBI.connect('dbi:Pg:bar')

Help me out here :-) I'm just trying to understand what it's doing, so I can
see whether I can make use of it.

If my guess is correct, then perhaps the pattern can be abstracted: e.g.

  dbh = Persistent[DBI, :connect, 'dbi:Pg:bar', ...]

and the implementation would be:

  module Persistent
    @things = {}
    def self.[](*args)
      @things[args] ||= args[0].send(*args[1..-1])
    end
  end

Regards,

Brian.