This second part of the book describes a wide variety of Perl modules
and applications that Oracle DBAs will find helpful. It consists of
the following chapters:
Chapter 3 describes Perl/Tk, an extensive
GUI-based toolkit for Perl, as well as a number of applications that
provide Oracle DBAs with graphically oriented tools for performing
database administration. In addition to Perl/Tk, this chapter covers
OraExplain, StatsView, Orac, DDL::Oracle,
SchemaDiff, Senora, DBD::Chart, SchemaView-Plus,
and a variety of Perl GUI integrated development environments (IDEs)
and debuggers.
Chapter 4 discusses the relationship between Perl
and the Apache web server, and focuses on two Oracle applications
that use a web browser as their user interface: Oracletool and Karma.
Chapter 5 explains how the use of
Apache's mod_perl module can
greatly improve the performance of Perl web-based CGI (Common Gateway
Interface) scripts used with Oracle. This chapter also covers several
related Apache modules: Apache::Registry,
Apache::DBI, and
Apache::OWA (used to connect mod_perl
to Oracle's PL/SQL Web Toolkit).
Chapter 6 describes two applications, Embperl and
Mason, that demonstrate the advantages of embedded scripting, a
method that allows Perl code to be embedded within web pages. These
tools provide a mechanism for filling your production web pages with
dynamic Oracle data and creating your own Oracle web tools, while
separating content from design issues.
Chapter 7 covers
Oracle::OCI, a Perl module that provides a more
extensive interface to Oracle's
OCI than is possible with Perl DBI.
Chapter 8 discusses
extproc_perl, a Perl module that communicates
with the Oracle PL/SQL language's external procedure
C library system (known as EXTPROC). This module and the others
described here allow Perl code to be embedded directly in PL/SQL
programs.
