On Thu, 2009-09-10 at 06:22 +1200, Kent Fredric wrote: > Hey, I'm bored. >
> Any of you out there I'd love to hear about so I can stop feeling > like such an alien :) ( I seriously googled, and I came up bare > handed, ) > Not a programmer myself, but I've used PERL in the past, mainly for data transfer and transformation. In the mid '90s was, to my knowledge, the only scripting language that could be used without much variations on VMS, NetWare/Novell, HP-UX, Solaris, ICL-NX, SCO and Win*, so I found it to be the option of choice for a data integration project. Plus it provided satisfactory connectivity layer - at the time - for most RDBMSs. Ok, maybe not for Oracle, but that was manageable through API calls. Since then I used it successfully for big chunks of the ETL component in two past data warehouse projects and just recently I used it to do a data migration for a charity organisation. Learning it was a winning bet for me because later I found it was supported - and still is, sometimes through generators - by most data integration products and ETLs, both proprietary and open source like Talend with its variation Kettle. I didn't find it hard to maintain, but the disclaimer here is that I used it almost exclusively for a single purpose - data processing - hence it wasn't hard to stick to a discipline in file organisation, coding and commenting the scripts. Adrian
