Re: What is Oraperl?

eteta_at_mbvlab.wpafb.af.mil (Ellen Teta (Sverdrup)) writes:

>I am familiar with Oracle, but not oraperl. Could someone
>tell me what it is and what are typical applications
>for it? I am about to load data (currently contained
>in a rather unstructured text file) into Oracle
>tables. Is Oraperl something that would help with
>this?

I would say that oraperl is _definitely_ something you would want to look into if you are in a unix environment. These days I use it instead of SQL*Loader, which has limited capabilities.

Oraperl is a set of user extensions to Larry Wall's perl language, one of the niftiest programming languages around. It uses the Oracle Callable Interface to permit SQL statements from within perl. The current version of oraperl is release 2, patch level 4, and it requires that you have version 3.0.27 or later of perl, but of course perl afficionados will want the latest and greatest version anyway. You also need to have the Oracle Pro*C module and the appropriate C compiler.

The developer of oraperl, Kevin Stock, does not currently have net access and there is no 'official' maintainer for it. There is a project underway to develop a more generalized perl SQL interface for most of the major RDBMS platforms (called either dbperl or perldb, I think), but nobody seems to know when this will produce something beyond functional specifications.

If you have ftp access, you can get oraperl from the usual suspects. It will be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

---
Michael Nolan, Sysop for the DBMS RoundTable on GEnie
nolan_at_notes.tssi.com, dbms_at_genie.geis.com
(posted from nolan_at_helios.unl.edu)