Re: Question for DBAs who use perl?

>>>>> "Ryan" == Ryan Gaffuri <rgaffuri_at_cox.net> writes:

 Ryan> What do you use it for? Trying to decide whether I should spend
 Ryan> the time to learn the basics. Looks like its just a scripting
 Ryan> language that allows for file manipulation. Is there anything
 Ryan> in perl that I cant do with awk or with Korn easily?

Well, it is just another scripting language. However, it is a lot more powerful than awk or a shell like korn. One advantage is that you can do everything in perl you can do with awk, sed, grep cut, tr, sort, etc without ever leaving perl, usually in a lot less lines of code and you only need to remember the syntax for a single language.

Other advantages are that it supports subroutines with locally scoped variables, libraries/packages and even object oriented features. There is also a huge amount of available packages and libraries from CPAN - I've found most of the time, I've been able to locate a package which will do anything I needed - complex date arithmetic, querying/setting SNMP servers, retrieving data via http, ftp, ssh/ssl, tftp, nntp, etc. and often end up just writing a few lines of code to solve reasonably complex problems quickly.

One of the things often put forward about perl is that it "lets yo do it your way" - for example, if you like to code like

if (some_test) {
  do_this
}

fine, but you could just do

do_this if some_test;

or instead of
open(HANDLE, FILE)

you could do

open HANDLE, FILE;

Essentially you can use perl in a way you like. The drawback with this is that allowing everyone to do things their own way can make large projects done in perl difficult to manage/maintain and it can be hard to work on code developed by others.

With respect to Oracle, I've found perl very handy when I have wanted to process files of data - PL/SQL is not very useful in this context, but perl can do it in just a few lines of code. Using packages/libraries of perl routines, you can get a nice uniform, powerful flexible toolset which can make it very easy to do a wide range of reporting and data manipulation or interface with other systems.

Tim

-- 
Tim Cross
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