Comments on: On the Topic of Programming 1

By: Tony Sleight

Tony Sleight — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 10:21:08 +0000

I have started to use perl quite a lot in my current role and have found it most useful. We are currently researching a tool called Pentaho, which allows you to build a task from various products and bring them together as a kind of script which can be executed via windows task scheduler on a regular basis.
One example we have used it for is to extract XML from a database package it into a zip file and send the zip file off to various locations. The zip file is saved in a folder for one month as a simple archive process. Pentaho sequences the PL/SQL, zip file creation, zip file copy and archive maintenance. A log file is created and the user can create individual actions on failures of any of the sequence steps.

By: Charles Hooper

Charles Hooper — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 11:44:46 +0000

Mladen,

Thank you for sharing the approach that you used to perform a similar data transfer. It is helpful for people to share their experiences of what works and what does not.

I have never worked with Perl, but I understand that the language is well regarded (one of the “P”s in the abbreviation LAMP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_(software_bundle) ). I wonder how well the Spreadsheet::ParseExcel module would do with the Excel 2.0 format – Microsoft Access cannot directly link to that data format (if I remember correctly), but that does not mean that other products cannot do the backward format integration more completely.

By: Mladen Gogala

Mladen Gogala — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 21:53:53 +0000

I’ve had tasks like that. My solution was Perl. Spreadsheet::ParseExcel module can read all known versions of Excel and putting the result into the database was a breeze.