I have been integrating MonetDB into a Perl system for the last few months, and have made a few changes to the Perl driver to improve performance and reliability. I hereby release these changes under the same license as MonetDB itself. I have permission from my employer to do this. Is this to correct place to send and/or discuss patches? In order of patch hunks; more details will be provided for any part if requested: 1. removes "use sigtrap", because this has global effects and should not be used by modules, only by the application. 2. allows Perl 5.8.1+ Unicode strings to be passed to quote() and included in statements (UTF-8 encoded, as expected by Monet's str module) 3. quote and unquote now use the same quoting rules as the MonetDB server, allowing for all characters except NUL to be round-tripped 4. several character loops have been reimplemented in regex for much greater performance 5. micro-optimizations to the result fetch loop 6. block boundaries are preserved in piggyback data so that Xclose is not appended or prepended to a SQL command 7. diagnostic messages #foo before a result header are ignored, this is necessary to use recycler_pipe 8. fail quickly and loudly if we receive a continuation prompt (or any other response that starts with a non-ASCII character) 9. header lines must start with %, not merely contain %, fixing a bug when querying a table where string values contain % 10. after closing a large resultset, account for the fact that a reply will come and do not lose sync 11. allow a MAPI_TRACE environment variable to dump wire protocol frames to standard output 12. fixes maximum MAPI block size to match the server limit of 16k. previously would crash on blocks larger than 16k