Discount Priced Books for You.

Vinicio Valencia:

This is NOT a book for learning Perl if you’re a DBA. The whole book is devoted to describe a lot of free DBA utilities written in this language, and it doesn’t give you any roboust help to build your own Oracle-Perl scripts. There’s a very little (about 40 pages) APPENDIX devoted to look at the language grammar and programming issues. The only chapter that deserve the only star I give for this book is CHP7 – OCI Calls with Oracle::OCI. But, is this a book written for DBA’s or developers?
If someone publish a book saying “UNIX Korn shell scripts for Oracle DBA’s”, what do I expect? Simply! learn about UNIX Korn shell and how to write DBA scripts for my Oracle system. But if the book talks about utilities written for Oracle in Korn shell scripts, then, clearly it fails its purpose.
Maybe those tools described can be useful for DBA tasks, specially because they’re free… the bottom line is that this book doesn’t teach you how to programm in Perl. Get something else, devoted just to Perl programming, like “Perl 6 Essentials” from Allison Randal.
Rating: 1 / 5

Anonymous:

Perl is the ideal language for Oracle DBAs. Those who are already aware of its strengths will have implemented it to some degree on their servers. For DBAs who may have heard rumours of its magic, then Part I of Andy Duncan and Jared Still’s “Perl for Oracle DBAs” will prove to be a substantial grounding in the synergy that can arise between Oracle and Perl’s virtues of Laziness, Impatience and Hubris. This section provides information on Perl’s background, its strengths and provides instructions for installing the language on UNIX, Win32 and Cygwin. (For those not in the know: Cygwin is a free UNIX emulation layer for Windows that includes a substantial collection of GNU tools). Perl is the ideal language for DBAs in a heterogeneous environment.

Experienced Oracle DBAs with a Perl bent should feel free to skip straight to Part II, Extending Perl. Here the authors provide information on Perl GUI and Web extensions, plus some Open Source tools for Oracle that make use of these features. They also discuss a feature I really like: the ability to call Perl routines from PL/SQL, but as the authors point out, you should be aware of the security implications.

To my mind, Part III: The PDBA Toolkit is the most valuable part of the book. The authors have kindly provided a set of superb Perl tools for the Oracle DBA. Everyone will have their favourites, but mine include the ability to monitor alert logs in real time and a password client/server combo for centralised, encrypted management over the network. Last but not least: the ability to monitor SQL and store explain plans for historical comparison over time.

This book is a like a Tardis – its much bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside. The volume of information could have been overwhelming, but the authors have taken the time to patiently explain the topics from first principles without ever patronising the reader. That’s a rare skill, and this is a fantastic book.
Rating: 5 / 5

Daniel W. Fink:

The best word to describe this book is ‘WOW!’ I had no idea that there was such an extensive set of perl tools and scripts for administering oracle databases. The book provides descriptions of the tools/scripts, instructions for download/installation and operational information. I can’t wait to dive in and explore each of the topics in depth (should take me a year or so…).
Rating: 5 / 5