FreeBSD6 Unleashed

Writing Administration Scripts

You’ve reached the next level in our breakneck tour through the world of databases; now that the tables in the sample databases are set up, you can move on past the use of the interactive command line and learn how to automate some of the longer, more painful queries. The MySQL or PostgreSQL command line will always be useful for design and tinkering purposes. However, some tasks that must be done on a regular basis and require long, involved queries demand that you find a less frustrating way to accomplish them.

Perl and Python both provide toolkits with which you can write scripts to interface with the database. These toolkits enable you to issue queries, extract data, process it, and feed data back into the system, ...