Perl for Oracle DBAs Author: Andy Duncan & Jared Still Pages: 602 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates ISBN: 0-596-00210-6 Summary: A very good exploration of using Perl in an Oracle environment Review Date: 16 July, 2003

Perl for Oracle DBAs aims to apply a powerful Open-Source scripting language to a powerful proprietary database. The marriage makes for a good match, and this book aims to be your guide in the many facets of that relationship. It does a good job in that respect, and lays before you a wide array of tools, utilities, modules, and more to help make your life as a DBA easier by using Perl.

The book assumes no prior knowledge about Perl, so it's appropriate for the Perl neophyte (although you'll want to be familiar with Oracle), but also has plenty for the seasoned veteran. The first few chapters provide an overview of Perl, as well as very easy to follow instructions for installing Perl on either UNIX systems, or on Windows systems. The book is nicely agnostic this way, in that installation examples almost always include instructions for UNIX and Windows. These installation instructions are very clear, and very helpful. If you've only used pre-packaged versions of Perl from vendors, the exercise of going through a Perl source install is rather enlightening. Also included here are helpful instructions for obtaining, building, and installing the various Perl modules you will need to interact with Oracle.

You might expect the chapters following to provide a tutorial on Perl, but such is not the case. That coverage comes at the back of the book in Appendix A, "The Essential Guide to Perl." While we're talking about appendices, Appendix B, "The Essential Guide to the Perl DBI" provides very good coverage on talking to Oracle through the DBI modules. Appendix C, "The Essential Guide to Regular Expressions," is a _very_ good quick tutorial on Perl regular expressions. It's really quite a gem. Figure C-9 alone is worth its weight, in, well, acid-free paper, at least. The last Appendix is "The Essential Guide to Data Munging," which discusses the various modules available for moving data out of a database, massaging it, and shoving it back into another database. Very useful for database warehousing applications.

Moving back to the flow of the book, the next section focuses on Perl GUI extensions, particulary Tk, and covers various Perl-based applications available for Oracle management. This section also covers Open-source IDEs and debuggers available for Perl. We also find here discussion of Apache, and various tools you can use to glue Apache, Perl, and Oracle together to create various web-based applications for your Oracle databases. If nothing else, this smattering of applications should give you a good idea of what can be done when you mix Perl and Oracle.

Moving on, if the DBI modules don't give you enough control over your interaction with Oracle, Chapter 7 introduces you to Oracle::OCI, a new Perl module that allows direct access to the Oracle Call Interface from Perl. No more excuses :-). Chapter 8 then discusses a module which allows you to embed Perl in SQL and PL/SQL by embedding a Perl interpreter as an Oracle library via extproc. Can you say 'Perl regexes in WHERE clauses?'. Combine that with a function-based index (if you're rich enough to use Enterprise Edition) and life looks pretty good from here on out.

The rest of the book covers in great detail a set of open-source Perl modules created by the authors called the PDBA toolkit. These modules can be used to accomplish a wide variety of routine database administration tasks such as adding users in bulk, monitoring the alert log, moving large amounts of data around more efficiently, and tracking changes to arbitrary schemas over time. Detailed instructions are provided on obtaining, building, and installing the modules, as well as coverage on the various tasks you can perform with them. As the modules are easily extensible, the authors dedicate a chapter to some useful examples of how you might extend the modules to meet your needs.

Throughout the book you'll find a lot of geeky humor, which makes the book fun to read, and sure to pull a smile from you from time to time. The coverage of the PDBA modules was helpful, but I don't know if they necessarily merited as much space in the book as they took. The book would be great even without including the PDBA toolkit, but in fairness, the toolkit does provide an excellent example of just what can be done with Perl for database administration. If nothing else, your Perl will likely be better after reading the book.

Overall there are some real gems in this book. As I mentioned earlier, the appendices make for a fantastic introduction to Perl, regular expressions, and the DBI modules (specific to Oracle), as well as a great place to refresh your knowledge if you've already used Perl.

There are a lot of very nice tools out there that open up a world of possibilities when you marry Perl and Oracle. This book serves as a well-executed guide for that journey.

If, like me, you are interested in further ways that Open Source software is being used with Oracle, you may want to have a look at O'Reilly's Oracle and Open Source, by Andy Duncan, and Sean Hull.

Overall rating: 8/10