Perl for Oracle DBAs

Chapter 13. Extending the PDBA Toolkit

In the preceding chapters we’ve introduced the Perl DBA Toolkit and tried to impress you with all the wonderful ways it can help make Oracle database administration more effective and efficient. But every site, and every DBA, is different. You will undoubtedly find that some of the scripts and supporting modules in the toolkit don’t operate quite as you would like them to. You may also find that some of the scripts give you good ideas for other scripts you wish we had included.^[71] Here are a few examples of PDBA Toolkit behavior that you may decide you want to modify:

Formatting

You may want to change the way that data is displayed in the dba_jobsm.pl script, which reports on the DBA_JOBS view from multiple databases.

Logging

You may want to change the PDBA::LogFile module to create a unique file name at each invocation.

Data retrieval

You may want to change the default return type in PDBA::GQ from a hash reference to an array reference

Configuration files

You may want to modify the PDBA::ConfigFile module to alter the paths where it searches for configuration files.

Security

You may want to use a different form of cryptography in the PDBA::PWD module (it currently uses Crypt::RC4).

In writing the software in the toolkit, and in describing the scripts and modules in this book, we’ve tried to “expose the code” — show you as clearly as possible how we’ve implemented the logic. One of our goals in developing this toolkit was to provide a ready-to-run ...