for publicly available Perl modules that are not part of the core Perl distribution. Windows Users of Microsoft Windows typically install one of the native binary distributions of Perl for Win32, most commonly Strawberry Perl or ActivePerl. Compiling Perl from source code under Windows is possible, but most installations lack the requisite C compiler and build tools. This also makes it difficult to install modules from the CPAN, particularly those that are partially written in C. ActivePerl is a closed-source distribution from ActiveState that has regular releases that track the core Perl releases. The distribution previously included the Perl package manager (PPM), a popular tool for installing, removing, upgrading, and managing the use of common Perl modules; however, this tool was discontinued as of ActivePerl 5.28. Included also is PerlScript, a Windows Script Host (WSH) engine implementing the Perl language. Visual Perl is an ActiveState tool that adds Perl to the Visual Studio .NET development suite. A VBScript-to-Perl converter, as well as a Perl compiler for Windows, and converters of awk and sed to Perl have also been produced by this company and included on the ActiveState CD for Windows, which includes all of their distributions plus the Komodo IDE and all but the first on the Unix/Linux/Posix variant thereof in 2002 and subsequently. Strawberry Perl is an open-source distribution for Windows. It has had regular, quarterly releases since January 2008, including new modules as feedback and requests come in. Strawberry Perl aims to be able to install modules like standard Perl distributions on other platforms, including compiling XS modules. The Cygwin emulation layer is another way of running Perl under Windows. Cygwin provides a Unix-like environment on Windows, and both Perl and CPAN are available as standard pre-compiled packages in the Cygwin setup program. Since Cygwin also includes gcc, compiling Perl from source is also possible. A Perl executable is included in several Windows Resource kits in the directory with other scripting tools. Implementations of Perl come with the MKS Toolkit, Interix (the base of earlier implementations of Windows Services for Unix), and UWIN. Database interfaces Perl's text-handling capabilities can be used for generating SQL queries; arrays, hashes, and automatic memory management make it easy to collect and process the returned data. For example, in Tim Bunce's Perl DBI application programming interface (API), the arguments to the API can be the text of SQL queries; thus it is possible