150,000 tables? Good grief! I admit that I know nothing about student information applications, but that seems like an awful lot of tables. Why so many? Paul Baumgartel CREDIT SUISSE Information Technology Prime Services Databases Americas One Madison Avenue New York, NY 10010 USA Phone 212.538.1143 paul.baumgartel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx www.credit-suisse.com ________________________________ From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of JApplewhite@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2008 4:26 PM To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Cc: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Perl Issues Our Developers wrote our Special Ed Student Info. application in Perl - about which I know zip. Without going into gory details of why, their code repeatedly checks for the existence of specific tables (out of the 150,000+ tables in our Production Student Info.) by doing "Select Count(*) From All_Tables Where Table_Name = '<TableName>'" whick is very inefficient, especially with 150,000 tables. First of all, I want them to not check for table existence and code in Exception Handling, but they are resistent to my suggestions. Second, if they don't code the Exception Handling, I want them to use a utility function that we have that more efficiently checks for table existence and returns a Boolean - True if exists, False if not exists. My two questions: 1. Can Exception Handling be easily done in Perl? If so, any good examples I can point them to? 2. They say that Perl can't handle Boolean values. Is that true? Any guidance here? Thanks. Jack C. Applewhite - Database Administrator Austin I.S.D. 414.9715 (phone) / 935.5929 (pager) ============================================================================== Please access the attached hyperlink for an important electronic communications disclaimer: http://www.credit-suisse.com/legal/en/disclaimer_email_ib.html ==============================================================================