Perl Issues

Our Developers wrote our Special Ed Student Info. application in Perl - about which I know zip. Without going into gory details of why, their code repeatedly checks for the existence of specific tables (out of the 150,000+ tables in our Production Student Info.) by doing "Select Count(*) From All_Tables Where Table_Name = '<TableName>'" whick is very inefficient, especially with 150,000 tables.

First of all, I want them to not check for table existence and code in Exception Handling, but they are resistent to my suggestions.

Second, if they don't code the Exception Handling, I want them to use a utility function that we have that more efficiently checks for table existence and returns a Boolean - True if exists, False if not exists.

My two questions:
1. Can Exception Handling be easily done in Perl? If so, any good examples I can point them to?
2. They say that Perl can't handle Boolean values. Is that true? Any guidance here?

Thanks.

Jack C. Applewhite - Database Administrator Austin I.S.D.
414.9715 (phone) / 935.5929 (pager)

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