Re: PERL?

I was. Unfortunately, I'm struggling with something called OpenLDAP, which was determined to be of even higher priority then Python.

On 12/08/2003 11:14:33 AM, "Orr, Steve" wrote:
> Hey Mladen,
>
> Weren't you going to be taking a look at Python too? (Around
> Thanksgiving as I recall.) I'd be interested in your feedback on it as
> well.
>
> My take is that Python is powerful yet easy to learn, it's much more
> productive than Java and is still quite scalable. Like Perl it's a great
> multi-platform scripting/glue language and shares many of its advantages
> but unlike Perl, it's been object oriented from the start. There is some
> looseness to its OO but the Python community touts that as an advantage.
> ;-)
>
> We have a Python story here where we host our software for the majority
> of our customers. While we perform most of the administration for our
> customers we also allow them to admin some stuff via a web app developed
> in Python. This app was developed under an accelerated schedule with a 3
> man team headed by a brilliant computer science PhD dweeb who really
> doesn't have to work for a living but chose to work with us just for the
> fun of it. One of the things our customers can do is perform upgrades of
> their app and this entails things like creating complete database
> schemas, Oracle backups and creating/dropping tablespaces among other
> things. (Kind of scary from a DBA control freak perspective.) Shortly
> after this web app went production, one of the developers was tragically
> killed, another developer who was an intern went back to school, and the
> PhD dude went on to be a university professor so the app was kind of
> dumped on my department consisting of a dozen admin type dweebs. We had
> to learn Python to maintain this mission critical app in short order.
> Not only were we able to quickly come up to speed to support the app, we
> have since greatly enhanced it to where it's become central to much of
> our SysAdmin/DBA duties. One reason for this successful transitions was
> the virtue of Python. Several in the department (myself included) were
> Perl literate beforehand and there is now unanimous consensus that we
> could not have had as good transition if the app had been written in
> Perl and we are glad Python was forced on us because the readability of
> Python code makes it MUCH more maintainable. Besides being DBA I've now
> done enough in Python that I am part DUHveloper. With socket programming
> and XML I've been able to transact between databases. (Which is
> definitely more sophisticated I/O than PL/SQL is capable of.) I've also
> used Python to develop a web server and I'm even thinking about
> replacing some Apache usage with my own web server code.
>
> Well that's our story and there's more to Python than I can cover here
> so as soon as hunting season is over I'm going to resume preparation for
> my upcoming IOUW presentation titled, "Python, Oracle and the Meaning of
> Life." Hope to see some of you there.
>
>
> Steve Orr
> Bozeman, Montana
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> Mladen Gogala
> Sent: Sunday, December 07, 2003 10:04 PM
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
>
>
> Perl is a general purpose interpreted programming language, written
> specifically with reporting purpose in mind. In fact, perl stands for
> "Practical Extraction/Reporting Language". That means that perl is
> excellent for producing all kinds of reports. In fact, it has a part
> called "formats" which is, in fact, a small report writer and can be
> used to produce beautiful reports very quickly and with minimal effort.
> The next very useful feature is an extremely versatile regular
> expression engine which can do whatever awk & sed can do and more.
> That, of course, is ideal for parsing all kinds of regular expressions,
> like, for instance, parsing alert.log. Perl , as I've said before, is
> a general purpose programming language with pointers (all right, all
> right, the name is "references", but those are really pointers) , which
> makes for an exceptionally powerful combination. Last, but not least,
> there is a huge treasure chest
> called "CPAN" (http://cpan.perl.org) which contains vast number of
> modules. In case of emergency, it's really easy to find something
> useful. One other thing worth mentioning is that perl has bindings and
> modules which make it possible to work with many databases, Tk, Gtk,
> HTML and almost anything conceivable (OLE, ODBC, ADO and other MS
> perversions included). There are two problems with perl. One is that
> perl is a huge language with so many intrinsic and important elements
> that it is really hard to learn the whole language. A title of a perl
> master should be an equivalent
> of a PhD. Another problem is a serious inadequacy of perl syntax for OO.
> Perl doesn't have classes, abstract classes, private/protected/public
> interface, templates, exception throw/catch mechanisms or some other
> things
> that we know and love. Perl's OO model is based on something called
> "module", essentially a program unit and a very weird function named
> "bless". This function plays a vital role in object construction and, it
> is done from up down to the ground instead of doing it from the ground
> up. Bless takes a pointer ("reference") and "blesses" it to the pointer
> to a member of a given class. That means that whatever the pointer is
> pointing to, becomes a class member. It is exactly like taking a stem
> and creating an apple or a pear at its end, depending on the need of the
>
> moment. Function "new" doesn't exist. There is no official constructor
> and there is no official destructor. Destroying objects is based on
> reference counting which is fast, much faster then Java background
> garbage collection, but also unreliable because it can be easily
> prevented. If you want a web version of perl, with a proper syntax and a
> smaller number of inscrutable undocumented language features, try PHP.
>
>
> On 2003.12.07 22:34, KENNETH JANUSZ wrote:
> > I've read a lot about PERL on this list. And, I am wondering what can
>
> > you do with PERL that you cannot do with SQL*Plus, PL/SQL or Unix
> shell scripts?
> >
> > Any information will be greatly appreciated.
> >
> > Thanks much,
> > Ken Janusz, CPIM
>
> --
> Mladen Gogala
> Oracle DBA
> --
> Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net
> --
> Author: Mladen Gogala
> INET: mgogala_at_adelphia.net
>
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> Author: Orr, Steve
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Mladen Gogala
Oracle DBA

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-- 
Author: Mladen Gogala
  INET: mladen_at_wangtrading.com

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