Chapter 3. Perl GUI Extensions

In Chapter 2, we looked at standard Perl and its database connectivity module, Perl DBI. The command-line interface available in Perl and Perl DBI has served developers well for many years. But over time, people have become more accustomed to graphical user interfaces (GUIs), and there has been a movement towards GUI facilities for Perl. Oracle DBAs in particular appreciate applications that give them an easy-to-use graphical interface for managing their databases and a way to visually inspect difficult-to-interpret database data. In this chapter we'll look at Perl/Tk, an extensive GUI-based toolkit, as well as at a number of applications (many of them based on Perl/Tk) that provide Oracle DBAs with the graphical interfaces they find so useful. We'll cover:

Perl/Tk

A popular toolkit often used to build GUIs in Perl for both Unix and Win32.

OraExplain

A Perl/Tk SQL tuning tool for Oracle that explains SQL execution plans. OraExplain was the first major canned application that combined Perl DBI and Perl/Tk for Oracle. It also inspired many other Perl/Tk applications.

StatsView

A statistics-gathering tool written in Perl/Tk for Oracle DBAs who also perform Unix system administration. This tool collects all kinds of useful statistics and then displays them in enhanced graphical format, courtesy of the gnuplot program.

Orac

A GUI wrapper program built using Perl/Tk that provides a useful way to maintain a repository of configurable SQL scripts for interrogating and managing Oracle databases.

DDL::Oracle

A nongraphical Perl package that reverse-engineers Data Definition Language (DDL) statements. This back-end Oracle package often drives Perl/Tk scripts in order to help them provide visual DDL aids for Oracle DBAs.

SchemaDiff

A Perl package built on DDL::Oracle and Perl/Tk that compares different Oracle schemas.

Senora

An interactive Oracle shell program that provides a flexible and extensible alternative to SQL*Plus.

DBD::Chart

A Perl driver interface that renders graphs and charts. DBD::Chart is another excellent supplementary module for visualizing complex information; it is often used to generate back-end images for use by Perl/Tk.

SchemaView-Plus

Another program built on Perl/Tk that compares different Oracle schemas. This program is also built on the Perl DBIx extension, DBIx::SystemCatalog.

Perl IDEs and GUI debuggers

Open source integrated development environments providing graphical interfaces for editing and debugging Perl code.

In the next chapter, we'll move on to look at the Perl extensions and applications that use the Web, rather than custom-built GUIs, as their user interface.