On Wed, Mar 29, 2006 at 12:19:03PM -0800, Joshua D. Drake wrote: > > > MY application sends XML requests to a perl script, which has to > > parse them and turn them into queries which get sent off, then the > > results are put back into XML, and sent back to the client. > > This doesn't answer your question... but why not just use plPerl? Reasonable question that I asked and my co-developer asked. Well the Perl middleware are CGI scripts, and some times do things other than DB queries, so they need to be outside the DB. I guess in DB Client/Server parlance the CGI scripts are the client. As to why PL/SQL instead of PL/Perl, I inherited the DB work by default, and I had some examples in PL/SQL, so I continued with that before I discovered PL/Perl. Since the two developers working on this are comfortable with Perl, we'll be investigating porting everything to PL/Perl, but for now we just need to get a functional prototype ASAP. -karl