Audience for This Book

If you're an Oracle DBA who is trying desperately to keep up with the daily demands of administering, monitoring, and tuning your Oracle databases, this book is for you. We are Oracle DBAs ourselves, and we know how difficult your job can be. This book provides both information and software that we hope will ease your burden.

Although the primary audience is Oracle DBAs, many DBAs end up being devel-opers from time to time, and there is no better language than Perl for writing those quick scripts. Anyone doing Perl development will find Chapter 7, Chapter 8, and Chapter 13, as well as the appendixes, particularly useful.

This book assumes no prior experience with Perl, though some knowledge of the language will help you get the most out of the material presented here. Although the book's appendixes explore the essential syntax of Perl, Perl DBI (DataBase Interface), Perl's regular expressions, and Perl's data-munging modules, a complete Perl tutorial is beyond our scope. Our goal here is to jump-start your explorations into the intersection where Perl meets Oracle. We'll provide plenty of suggestions for where to go next on your journey.