Re: How important is Perl for a dba ???

On Wed, 11 Apr 2001, AMinocha_at_herold.com wrote:

> Hi, I was wondering how important it is for a DBA to learn
> perl.

It is important to know a good programming/scripting tool, so that you aren't always pointing and clicking to one-off jobs. I script quite a bit of stuff using Cygwin on NT, "Unix on a windows desktop" but I haven't used Perl very much.

> Also what are the advantages perl has over other languages.

Perl has a lot of C and alot of shell bottled into one nice interpreted package.

> I mean what is that makes perl a preferred language for
> database scipting and other stuff.

I'm assuming you read this somewhere. If one knows Perl, they have a tool that allows them to code many many jobs in a short period of time. Perl is really powerful, has tremendous user support and is always having new extensions added to it.

But, it is much more important to understand Oracle than it is to know Perl if you want to be a good DBA. Designing a good program is much harder than coding that well-designed program. A really good DBA would immediately have a picture of the design of a good program for a tool to accomplish some DBA task. The language used for that tool would be secondary and the task of coding the program wouldn't be too difficult. Rewriting the program because the design had flaws, on the other hand ...

--
I don't want to be the rock.  Yeah, okay, what do you want to be?
I want to be the piece of glass.