Preface

There are many books on Perl and many books on Oracle, but until now there have been no books dedicated to describing the relationship between these two popular technologies. Our aim is to bridge the gap between the world's leading data-processing language and the world's leading database. The Perl language was created with the goal of making "the easy things easy and the hard things possible." Oracle's ever-expanding purpose is to provide a complete database environment for the entire interconnected world. This mission makes Oracle a tough taskmaster — and thus an environment ideally suited to Perl, because being an Oracle database administrator is one of the toughest jobs around.

Oracle DBAs need enormous intelligence, infinite patience, and considerable courage. We think they also need Perl. The Perl open source language is a many-splendored thing; you can write scripts with it, develop GUIs with it, create web sites with it, generate XML with it — and you can probably hang your towels from it! Perl fills data warehouses and runs on virtually every operating system around. Perl is the toolkit without limitations, the salvation of your 24x7 lifestyle. If Gandalf the Wizard were to choose a scripting language, he would choose Perl.

Our mission in this book is to show you how Perl can revolutionize your life as an Oracle DBA. We'll focus on four aspects of the Perl/Oracle connection:

The Perl language itself

We'll introduce you to the Perl language, with its rich history and culture, present some language basics, and shine some light on CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, the main distribution point for Perl modules.

The Perl/Oracle architecture

We'll introduce you to the modules that allow Perl programs to communicate with Oracle databases.

Perl applications for Oracle DBAs

We'll profile about a dozen of the best ready-made applications written in Perl for use by Oracle DBAs. These provide help with database administration, monitoring, tuning, and daily troubleshooting. They also provide components you can use in your own Perl scripts, should you choose to add a little program development to your daily DBA routine.

The PDBA Toolkit

We'll present, for your enjoyment, an Oracle database administration toolkit we've written ourselves. The Perl Database Administration (PDBA) Toolkit contains nearly 100 Perl scripts and reusable modules that perform operations ranging from creating new Oracle users to monitoring the Oracle alert log to building a repository of database information for use in tuning and troubleshooting. All of this code is available on the O'Reilly web site (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/oracleperl/pdbatoolkit).