Re: What's the biggest piece of work you've done alone with Perl?

[Abigail-II]

Probably the time I became a database administrator in the company I worked for. We had about 20 database servers (the amount varied), with 400 to 500 databases running on them (the amount of databases varied daily).

The previous administrator had made a mess of things - he would just sit in his cubicle, and only move his ass when people started to complain they could no longer do their job. Nothing was being monitored. Backups were automated, but since everything was hardcoded, and not touched for a long time, most databases, including the more important ones were not updated - and noone was inspecting the output for errors. When I took over, I was working 10+ hours/day just to keep things running. At my first day as a dba, I hacked my first monitoring program together, and at least I would get paged if a database became unavailable, instead having to wait till user started to complain. Within months, everything was database and every server was being monitored for their vital statistics, all databases would be backed up daily (no recoding needed if databases were added or deleted), databases would be dbcc-ed regulary, and many problems would be solved automatically within a minute of them occurring, and I was down of spending less than 4 hours a day on my dba tasks, while getting an uptime of over 99.95% outside of the maintainance windows. With the vital statistics of the most important statistics being graphed - to please manglement.

This turned out to be my biggest mistake as well. When the company had to lay off people, they decided a dba was no longer needed. :(

As for strategies/techniques/modules, the code itself wasn't too much. All monitoring less than 1000 lines of code. The Sybase reference and sysadmin modules of the documentation where vital though. I used Sybase::DBlib to make the database connections, gnuplot for the graphing, and /bin/mailx for the paging.

Abigail