There’s no doubt that there are plenty of books for the Oracle DBA covering areas like maintenance, tuning, and backup and recovery strategies. Likewise, Perl books abound. Strangely enough, there’s almost nothing on harnessing the power of these two technologies together. Decartes and Bunce’s “Perl DBI” goes some of the way, but its focus is on getting Perl to talk to databases in general.
“Perl for Oracle DBAs,” however, aims to fill the gap, and is broad-ranging and eclectic in its sweep. It covers the necessary tasks of installing Perl and the database interface, but also shows you how to call Perl from database stored procedures. Oracle::OCI provides a lower-level alternative to the standard DBI interface, and a higher-level option for C coders.
The authors direct the reader to a number of Perl GUI and Web tools that will make the DBA’s life easier, but the unique contribution is their own Oracle DBA toolkit. Modules for mundane tasks such as user setup and real-time alert log monitoring are provided. Other contributions include a password server and client, and a repository for database changes and SQL execution plans. And, as with all good Perl code, you can build on top of the toolkit and extend it. This book has much to offer the neophyte and the expert. Highly recommended.
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