First, a disclaimer. I’m not a database administrator. But if I were, this would have to be my number one choice for a no-nonsense guide. O’Reilly has a strong reputation for books that have a high signal-to-noise ratio, and this is no exception. It is packed to the brim with down-to-earth, practical guidance tips, including what to do when things go wrong. Often, such texts adopt the rather optimistic “follow my instructions and nothing will go wrong” philosophy, but as the authors comment on the first page of the first chapter, “We know the frustrations the job can bring."

The book is divided into four major sections: “Introducing Perl for Oracle,” “Extending Perl,” “The Perl DBA (Database Administration) Toolkit,” and appendices. The last section alone is worth the cost of the book. It has four “Essential Guides” about Perl, Perl database interface (DBI), regular expressions, and Perl data munging. I have already applied a couple of useful tips I found in the last section to programs I am currently working on, and found the information to be both easy to follow and concise.

The opening chapter is the only chapter of the book that does not have code fragments or other step-by-step instructions in it. Rather, it gives some useful background to the choice of Perl. Chapter 2 then launches straight into the task of installing Perl. Even questions such as whether to install Perl code from tar files versus the comprehensive Perl archive network (CPAN) are explained in straightforward terms, with each of the advantages and disadvantages clearly identified, thus giving sufficient explanation for novice users to make an informed choice.

One of the strengths of Perl, and of the book itself, is its platform independence. That is an attribute commented on by the authors in their introductions, but they go further than paying it lip service: they show how all their examples can be applied across a range of both Windows and Unix variants. Missing from the text is any reference to the Macintosh environment, although I would imagine that many Mac OS X users will be able to adapt the Unix instructions and scripts to their systems.

The two main central sections of the book take the reader through the extensions that Perl provides to the basic database functionality, particularly in terms of Web interfacing (Section 2), and using the Perl database administrator’s (PDBA) toolkit to perform routine tasks (Section 3). A case study of building a repository to track changes to a database is included in Section 3, together with a chapter on modifying and extending the PDBA toolkit to handle tasks outside the scope of the book.

The writing style is largely that of a reference manual, making it easy to dip into the relevant sections to find what one needs. Each section is self-contained, and is interspersed with sufficient humor to keep it from becoming too dry. One example: “When it’s installing, take a look at all of those mod ules you get. It’s just like Christmas...” There are many uniform resource locators (URLs) to extend the content span of the book, but it’s a pity that these could not be made available at the book’s own Web site, to avoid having to retype any on which you might wish to follow up.

I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in managing Oracle databases, especially those who are looking to add the synergy of Perl scripting to those databases. The book is full of useful hints, together with many pointers about how to tackle common database interface issues.