http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=58053

MadraghRua has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi Folks,
I am working with an Oracle database that contains a number of long raw data fields. I don't have information on how the data is stored into these fields - I just know that what should come out would be some variation on ascii.

I know a little about Perl::DBI but am not a complete expert, although I have read the O'Reilly book and did RTFM. So assuming I can do a select query to get the long raw data, how might I go about extracting what is in there? Basically I'm looking for some tests to try and figure out how the data has been stored so that I can better understand how to do this extraction. Could someone please give me a few ideas so that I can at least get started here?

Thanks in advance for the wit and wisdom.

MadraghRua
yet another biologist hacking perl....