Skip to Main Content
Oracle and Open Source
book

Oracle and Open Source

by Andy Duncan, Sean Hull
April 2001
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
432 pages
13h 2m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Oracle and Open Source

Perl

Perl is perhaps the most popular of all open source tools, and the earliest to appear of the major open scripting languages. It is also used frequently to write database applications. We’ll explore the language in more depth in Chapter 3, where we also discuss other scripting languages. For now, we’ll focus on how Perl is used to connect to Oracle databases via its Perl Database Interface (DBI) module. (Perl DBI provides a generic interface to a variety of databases, including Oracle.)

Perl has become an important tool for Oracle DBAs and developers because it is operating system-independent, powerful, flexible, remarkably quick to code, and extremely fast in execution. These capabilities are especially important if you are working in a rapidly changing environment where one day you might be populating a data warehouse from a difficult data source, and the next day generating a dynamic web application. Today’s distributed corporate databases, so vital for the success of any business, have become almost too complex for their own survival, and many DBAs and developers have found that Perl is one of the best ways to tackle this complexity. With a script here and a script there, Perl can turn a potential data implosion into a real-world information explosion. Perl’s magical ability is all the more magical because it’s also freely available.

In the following sections we’ll describe how you can obtain and install Perl on Unix, Linux, and Win32 systems. We’ll also describe how the ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Oracle Procure-to-Pay Guide

Oracle Procure-to-Pay Guide

Melanie Cameron
Expert Oracle Exadata

Expert Oracle Exadata

Kerry Osborne, Randy Johnson, Tanel Pöder
Expert PL/SQL Practices for Oracle Developers and DBAs

Expert PL/SQL Practices for Oracle Developers and DBAs

John Beresniewicz, Adrian Billington, Martin Büchi, Melanie Caffrey, Ron Crisco, Lewis Cunningham, Dominic Delmolino, Sue Harper, Torben Holm, Connor McDonald, Arup Nanda, Stephan Petit, Michael Rosenblum, Robyn Sands, Riyaj Shamsudeen
Achieving Extreme Performance with Oracle Exadata

Achieving Extreme Performance with Oracle Exadata

Rick Greenwald, Robert Stackowiak, Maqsood Alam, Mans Bhuller

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596000189Catalog PageErrata