Programming the Perl DBI

Some Miscellaneous dbish Commands

As dbish is a fairly fully featured command-line shell,^[66] it has some convenient commands defined within it that allow you to commit and roll back database changes, recall statements and commands that you’d executed in the past, and even execute arbitrary Perl statements!

One of the most useful of the miscellaneous statements is /table_info , which lists the tables in the database that you are currently connected to. This statement is indispensable when you’re trying to remember exactly what that pesky table name is!

A full list of these commands can be seen by typing the all-important /help command.

dbish is currently a handy tool for performing quick tasks on a database. It should continue to evolve over time into an indispensable part of the database administrator’s and database developer’s armory, much like proprietary tools such as Oracle’s SQL*Plus utility.

^[66] dbish’s powerful command-line editing functionality comes courtesy of the Term::Readline and Term::Readline::Gnu modules. You don’t need to install them to use dbish, but it helps.