2009/9/10 Adrian Mageanu <[email protected]>: > On Thu, 2009-09-10 at 06:22 +1200, Kent Fredric wrote: >> 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, ) > 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 have used Perl extensively for sys admin tasks in the past, and recently (within the last 2 years) for ETL type stuff too... Adrian - I agree that it is the most portable option across the *nix platforms....and that my little bag of Perl scripts moves with me from job to job and can easily be adapted to different platforms and varying tasks. I've found it to be thoroughly documented, really well thought through and an excellent option for system administrators. Perl can be written with OO style, however I've only ever needed to use it in a very procedural script like sense. In terms of ETL, the only reason I have used it is because I was forced to help in an emergency situation where something needed to be done yesterday, and certain 'architects' still feel that 'persisting data' means sending CSV files over FTP where they can be parsed by ... something ... and kept ... somewhere. This is not the time for a rant about SOA...and providing RESTful interfaces for data access/manipulation. I'm quite keen to learn Python (and Django) but alas the available time is limited, and other things keep getting in the way. I'm new to this list so should probably introduce myself... I've been living in Christchurch for about 18 months, was on the road for a while prior to that, and have pretty much grown up and spent most of my life in Sydney. I work for an Australian telco, based in my home office. Most of my professional life in the ICT industry has been spent as a sys admin of Linux (RHEL), Tru64, Solaris systems and also as a hacky DBA of Oracle and MySQL databases. In the last 2 years I have given most of that away to focus on ... writing code. I've primarily been writing PHP in the Symfony MVC framework, and occasionally some Java based web service clients. I like beer. I like mountain bikes. I like not commuting for 2.5 hours a day ... like I used to do in Sydney... nuff said. -Abhinav
