Table of Contents for

MySQL in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

This function creates a statement handle by preparing an SQL statement given as the first argument for subsequent execution with execute(). It returns a reference to the statement handle. The second argument is a hash of attributes and is optional. A prepared statement or a statement handle may be used multiple times until the disconnect() is issued or until the statement handle value is overwritten by another call to prepare() for the same statement handle variable. More than one statement handle can be prepared if different variables are used for storing the handle references. Here is an example:

my $dbh = DBI->connect ("$dsn","$user","$pwd")
my $sql_stmnt = "SELECT title, author FROM books";
my $sth = $dbh->prepare($sql_stmnt, {RaiseError => 1, ChopBlanks => 1});

Warning messages are enabled here and trailing spaces of fixed-width character columns are trimmed. See the end of this chapter for a list of attributes.