Chapter 9. Installing the PDBA Toolkit

In earlier chapters we looked at a number of applications that Perl programmers have developed to help you perform Oracle database administration tasks. In this part of the book we'll introduce our own toolkit of scripts and modules written in Perl. These scripts are also aimed at Oracle DBAs and focus on areas of database administration that aren't covered in the other applications we've examined. You will find all of the toolkit code freely available on the O'Reilly web site (see the Preface for details).

Rather than being a ready-made application, you can think of the Perl DBA Toolkit (PDBA, for short) described in this chapter and the following ones as a collection of resources. You can run the scripts as is, or you can build on them in any way you wish. Think of the scripts provided in the toolkit as a handy collection of sailing knots and rigging splices that you can use for tying various Perl modules together into the best Oracle DBA solution for your own needs.

In this chapter, we'll cover these topics:

Introducing the toolkit and its core modules

We'll explain the contents of the toolkit and describe the functionality of the common modules that are used by many of the Perl scripts described in subsequent chapters.

Installing the toolkit

We'll describe how to install the toolkit on Unix and Win32 systems.

Configuring the toolkit

After installation, we'll explain how you can configure the toolkit with users, passwords, and other system-specific characteristics to meet your own site's needs.

Subsequent chapters describe different components of the toolkit in greater detail.

One part of the toolkit, the PDBA repository, requires special installation procedures; those are covered in Chapter 12, not in the general installation procedures described in this chapter. If you do not need the capabilities provided by the repository, you can simply skip that chapter and the repository installation.