Hi, I agree with Jared. I like using their book as a starting point for Oracle administration ideas in perl. Its a cross platform solution, with only minor variations per OS. I support python because its based on open source, but I currently prefer perl because there are already thousands of published modules for a huge variety of tasks, including parsing and mailing the alert logs. Regards, Mike Thomas PS: My perl toolset: OReilly's perl cd bookshelf, active state's perl, komodo (personal preference), Srinivasan's Advanced Perl Programming, Jared & Andy's book, and Scott's Perl Medic. On Mon, 18 Oct 2004 08:13:37 -0700, Jared Still <jkstill@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mon, 18 Oct 2004 17:06:14 +0200, Carel-Jan Engel > <cjpengel.dbalert@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Look in Connor McDonalds book Mastering Oracle PL/SQL. He describes some > > nice packages > > Or Andy Duncan's and Jared Still's "Perl for Oracle DBA's" , which has > features that cannot be emulated in PL/SQL. :) > > -- > Jared Still -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l