Re: Scripting language for DBAs
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2012 16:01:36 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <8831365.1411.1334098896986.JavaMail.geo-discussion-forums_at_vbbfj25>
On Tuesday, April 10, 2012 12:02:00 PM UTC-4, joel garry wrote:
> On Apr 9, 2:42 pm, Mladen Gogala <gogala.REMOVETHISmla..._at_google.com>
> wrote:
> > For a very, very long time indeed, Perl ruled supreme among the languages
> > to interface with a DB, be it Oracle, MySQL, Postgres or MS SQL. DBI was
> > (and still is) a polished and useful interface which can do practically
> > anything, from extracting query result and producing a quick little report
> > using formats to complex things like copying Oracle to MySQL and doing it
> > fast. Convenient things with Perl were:
> >
> > 1) Easy handling of piping and the ability to open commands by using
> > stuff like open(LPR,"|lpr")
> > 2) Multitude of modules available on CPAN
> > 3) Regular expressions, still unsurpassed in their versatility
> > 4) Availability of tools like perltidy or perlcritic and Perl
> > syntax being well understood by both editors like Vim and operating
> > systems like Emacs.
> > 5) The fact that everybody knew it.
> >
> > I am now working for a company where everybody keeps telling that Perl is
> > "old", Perl doesn't have an object model, it has a zoo instead, and that I
> > should learn Python. I tried. God and Larry Ellison know that I have tried
> > and gave it my best. The problem is, however, that I don't need a fully OO
> > language to extract result of a query and mail it to my PHB. I need the
> > "format" command and MIME::Lite. I was able to write the script both in
> > Perl and Python and lo and behold, Perl was shorter and more elegant.
> >
> > So, at risk that I am called a dinosaur, I am asking the respected
> > colleagues from this group what do you you use? Is there anything even
> > remotely akin to Perl "format" command in Python? Why is that guy van
> > Rossum not on the FBI's most wanted list?
> >
> > --http://mgogala.freehos tia.com
>
> Neither, although I've intended to become conversant in Perl since the
> last century. I do most stuff in the sillly 4GL that the ERP system I
> deal with is written in, and the rest in ksh and SQL, unless Oracle
> makes me debug their Perl code.
>
> Yesterday I was poking about on the tubes in a fog, and somewhere
> someone blogged about Perl 6, and how it was so different than 5 that
> it would lose all the institutional memory 5 and 5.10 has accumulated,
> so everyone should go to bash. Everyone has their shibboleths, I
> guess. (And looking the term up in Wikipedia, I learned something
> new: 'The term originates from the Hebrew word
> "shibbólet" (שִׁבֹּלֶת), which literally means the part of a plant
> containing grains, such as an ear of corn or a stalk of grain[3] or,
> in different contexts, "stream, torrent".' Streams and BitTorent from
> the ancients, who knew?)
>
> jg
> --
> _at_home.com is bogus.
> “did not realize what he was doing was in violation of the law.”
> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/technology/text-message-spam-difficult-to-stop-is-a-growing-menace.html
I guess the IT community has never learned their lessons... there are lots of languages out there, scripting, 3GL, 4GL, OO, blah, blah, blah. Right now, everone is SOOO enamored with JAVA (piece-o-crap) and it's OO abilities. There are things I have done in C that made JAVA look like "B". I once took a JAVA app that just created a CSV output stream that was fed into SQLLoader and re-wrote it in C. The JAVA version could only get up to about 60K records/second ingested into the database. My "C" program did >1.8M records/sec. The original was Perl/MySQL - it did approximately 20K/min. (yes... per minute). Moral of the story:
QUIT THINKING YOU KNOW WHAT IS THE BEST TOOL AND TEST TO MAKE SURE YOU ARE USING THE BEST TOOL FOR THE JOB - REGARDLESS OF WHAT IS "COOL". There was one more thing really bugs me... and that is the script kiddies that copy all of these "frameworks" to make their job easy, when all it does is show their laziness and ignorance. Yes, some them do cool stuff - but most perform like a PC/AT-286 with 16MB of main memory and 2 floppy disks trying to run Window7. Computer languages are really not that hard to figure out. They all do the same thing, they just do them differently. Received on Tue Apr 10 2012 - 18:01:36 CDT