Programming in PERL: Using/Programming the Database Interface

Course Number:  701-JK
Recommended Duration:  2 days

Intended Audience
Experienced PERL Developers needing to increase their PERL skills.

Course Overview
This course teaches both the programming interface and the techniques that can be used to write procedures in PERL (Practical Extraction and Report Language) to demonstrate methods of data persistence. These include a number of PERL extensions, and the DBI interfaces to commercial databases such as Oracle, Sybase, and mySQL.

Objectives
Each student will be able to use PERL techniques and commands to write scripts to perform various methods of database interactions.

Prerequisites
Completion of the "Programming in PERL: Basic/Intermediate" or equivalent experience is assumed.  A basic understanding of object oriented techniques (in PERL) is useful but not mandatory.

Topics

• Overview of data and databases

• Usage on various types of systems

• Historical interfaces

• Role of PERL in data acquisition and access

• Non-DBI Databases

• Traditional storage techniques

• PERL extensions to manipulate complex structures: file storage, network access

• Flat file databases

• Concurrent access and lock mechanisms

• MLDBM (multi-level database) extension

• Relational databases and SQL overview

• Datatypes

• Querying data

• Creating and destroying tables

• Modifying data in tables

• PERL Database Interface Extensions

• Obtaining necessary files

• Extending PERL with DBI

• DBI architecture (within PERL)

• Programming the PERL DBI

• Handles

• Data source identifiers

• Database connection / disconnection

• Error handling

• Miscellaneous utility methods

• Simple queries

• Non-SELECT statements

• Binding parameters and output columns

• The do( ) and prepare( ) methods

• Attributes and metadata

• Transaction locking

• ODBC and the Database Interface

• Using the DBD and Win32 extensions

• DBI Shell and Proxy Databases

• dbish distribution

• Database Proxy Architecture