Perl virtual tables for DBD::SQLite : ready to test

Followup to my previous article : a first draft of Perl virtual table support for DBD::SQLite is available at https://github.com/DBD-SQLite/DBD-SQLite/tree/vtab .

This is still alpha software, but it shows the idea; I still don't know when this work will be mature enough for a CPAN publication.

Two examples of virtual table modules are bundled with the distribution :

• FileContent : implements a virtual column that exposes file contents. This is especially useful
  in conjunction with a SQLite FTS fulltext index; see the doc in Fulltext_search.pod
• PerlData :  binds a virtual table to a Perl array within the Perl program. This can be used for simple import/export operations, for debugging purposes, for joining data from different
  sources, etc.

I'm currently thinking of one more example , which would be fun to play with : a virtual table that would proxy to another DBI connection. Then we could join data from various sources, using SQLite's features to do the joining work. Sounds quite exciting, but at this point this is just an idea.

Thanks to Salvador Fandiño who pointed me to https://metacpan.org/pod/SQLite::VirtualTable, which is similar in idea but more meant to embed a Perl interpreter inside a sqlite application, rather than the other way around; this code helped me build the DBD::SQLite version.

Of course any comments/suggestions are welcome.