Storing object on the DB and retrieving it

Question

I have a perl object (reference to array of references) like the below:

my $a = [ [$a, $ab, $c ], [$a, $b, $c] ] ;

and need to store it on the DB then retrieve it.

Could someone suggest a good mechanism to serialize even to compress it and then store it on the DB? Then deserialize it and use it in the code?

Answer 1

You may use any of the known serializers, e.g. JSON::XS or Storable. Storable is better if you want to retrieve references as references, not as copies of values. Then save a serialized object in the field of any type (VARCHAR, BLOB, ...) that satisfy storage requirements.

use Storable qw(nfreeze thaw);
use DBI;

# ... connect to database
# Store
my $data = [ [$a, $b, $c ], [ $a, $b, $c ] ];
my $bytestream = nfreeze $data;
$dbh->do('insert into table (field) values(?)', undef, $bytestream);

# Retrieve
$bytestream = $dbh->selectrow_array('select field from table where ...');
$data = thaw $bytestream;

Additionally, you can compress $bytestream, for example, via IO::Compress::Gzip

my $bytestream = gzip nfreeze $data;