Welcome to the Perl DBA Toolkit.

This code was developed and written as we wrote the
book Perl for Oracle DBAs, by Andy Duncan and Jared Still
(O'Reilly & Associates, 2002).

The PDBA Toolkit is a collection of Perl modules and scripts
designed to help Oracle DBAs. 

The toolkit contains
scripts of many different types. For example, 
you will find scripts used to set up a password server 
for securely retrieving passwords
over the network. (pwd.conf, pwd.pl, pwc.pl pwc.conf).
You will also find scripts to add and remove users, 
dump schemas into CSV files complete with 
SQL*Loader control files
for loading the data (sqlunldr.pl), and a wide variety of other
helpful scripts.

The toolkit also contains a
number of modules created in support of the scripts.
You can use these in developing your own scripts if you wish:

PDBA::CM: Database Connection Manager
PDBA::ConfigFile:  Configuration File locate and load
PDBA::DBA: A number of methods to work with the Oracle Data Dictionary
PDBA::Daemon: Create Daemons on Unix systems
PDBA::GQ:  The Generic Query module.  Simple module for single table queries
PDBA::LogFile: Create logfiles and write time-stamped log entries
PDBA::OPT: Used to pass command-line options to the PDBA::PWC module
PDBA::PWC: Password server client module
PDBA::PWD: Password server module
PDBA::PidFile: Used to create locked semaphore files

The toolkit also contains Win32/NT specific versions 
of a few of the modules and scripts (e.g., PWDNT.pm).  
The Win32/NT modules and scripts only appear in the Win32 distribution of
this toolkit (identified by the inclusion of 'NT' in the file name).
For example, PDBA_1_0_Win32.tar.gz is the Win32/NT
distribution, whereas PDBA-1.0.tar.gz is the Unix distribution.

The main source of documentation for this code is the book.
This README does not attempt to describe how to install and
use the toolkit. However, there is also quite a bit of 
documentation included in the modules themselves
You can view this documentation
via the 'perldoc' command (e.g., perldoc PDBA::CM)

Many of the scripts and modules make use of configuration files. These
files are actually Perl code used to create data structures.  They
are fairly well documented in the configuration files themselves.
Even if you don't know Perl well (yet), these should be simple to set
up.

If you have ever set up an Oracle TNSNAMES.ORA file, 
you should be able to set up a toolkit configuration
file. You can check them  for syntactical correctness
via perl -cw myfile.conf.

Installation of the toolkit is fairly straightforward.

On Unix systems, you will use the standard:

  perl Makefile.PL
  make test
  make install

On Win32, you will simply install via ActiveStage's PPM.

Some of the tests you will need to run as a DBA account,
or at least an account with 'SELECT ANY TABLE' privilege.

Before running 'make test', set the environment
variable ORACLE_USERID to the account name and
password of a DBA account. For example:

On Unix:  export ORACLE_USERID='system/manager'

On Win32/NT: set ORACLE_USERID="system/manager"

If you're on Win32, you may have problems with the the
Win32::TieRegistry module as follows:

Win32::TieRegistry errors
"cannot FETCH blah, blah, blah at line 1486 of Tie::Registry.pm"
Be sure to use a version of 0.24+.  0.23 will not work properly.


Requirements

The following modules must be installed for the toolkit to work:

DBI
DBD::Oracle
DDL::Oracle
Crypt::RC4
Date::Format
Date::Manip
Digest::MD5
Mail::Sendmail

These are all available via CPAN, http://search.cpan.org

On Win32 systems, you must also have the following module: 

Win32::Daemon

This can be downloaded from CPAN, or from www.roth.net.


Bugs, Comments, Change Requests:

Send requests for new functionality to pdbarfc@yahoo.com

Send bug reports to pdbabugs@yahoo.com

Patches are welcome for both. :)


A Final Note

You may find a few scripts in the distribution 
that don't appear in the book.  It wasn't possible to put
everything in the book, and we keep coming up with new ideas
for scripts.  :)