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pennop
03-13-03, 11:01
I have been asked to look at Perl and it's suitability for carrying out dba tasks. I have no knowledge at all about it - can some kind soul please explain to me how I install and set it up - It will be running on a win2k advanced server with udb v7.2 the client machines are NT4 & win2k Professional with 7.2 clients installed

thanks in anticipation

Bernd Dulfer
03-14-03, 03:18
It's a tough job to evaluate something you have no knowledge about! So here some hints:

Go to www.activestate.com, they distribute Perl for win32.
Get it and install it, instructions are on the website, it's free.

Get the database modules you need (DBI and DBD::Db2) using the ppm program, instructions again on the website or meanwhile somewhere on your disk.

I don't know about a DBI tutorial for beginners at the moment so I can't help you here.

I'm writing a DBA cookbook at the moment, it's focused on Sybase, but the idea behind the recipes may fit to any DBA's problems. You can take a look and see how simple most tasks can be solved. It can be found here:
www.widd.de/bernd/cookbook/sybase_dba_perl_cookbook.html

If you want to start programming Perl, there's a lot of information on the web:
www.perlmonks.org is a very good Perl community with lots of tutorials.

At perltraining.com.au/notes.html you will find training material for beginners Perl courses.

perl.oreilly.com has a set of very good Perl books, including one about database usage.

Perl itself comes with a huge documentation but it isn't easy to learn Perl with it, try perldoc perl on the command line and have a look.

Each module has it's own documentation, so when you have installed DBI and DBD::Db2 have a look at it:
perldoc DBI and perldoc DBD::Db2 on the commandline.

In my opinion Perl is the best language for DBA tasks:
It can connect to about any database on earth, it's fast, it's relatively simple, it helps you to solve you problems fast (it's semi interpreted, so you don't need a compiler) and it has lots of other advantages over java or c.

I hope that's enough to get you started.