This talk is all about how an Oracle DBA has been using the Python programming language in his work and why Python might be a good language for other DBAs to use. There are hundreds of programming and scripting languages. Why Python? Also, database administrators are not full time programmers. Should they learn a programming language or just stick to SQL commands and shell scripts? This is just one person’s experience but there are two reasons why learning and using Python could be good for an Oracle DBA. Python is easy to use and it connects to everything.
Python is easy to use in the sense that once you put the effort in to learn the language it is easy to come back to it. An Oracle DBA has a million things in their head. We have to keep learning new Oracle database features and internals with each dot release. Each of us has some limit to how many things we can keep in the front of our brain. We probably would not write a Python program every day. It might be weeks between uses. Python could be well suited for this situation. It has great online documentation and all kinds of information on the web. Plus several language features seem well suited for the occaisional programmer.
There are a ton of libraries that you can use with Python. Of course you can connect to Oracle and other databases. But you can do a lot of things DBAs would want to do. You can run programs like you would from a Unix shell. You can ssh into systems. Also, various cloud providers have Python interfaces. Python has been referred to as a “glue” language for connecting systems. Python has nice graphics libraries for making charts.
Most database administrators are not going to step away from their main job and become full time Python programmers. But, maybe their work can be enhanced by Python because it is easy to come back to after having been away from it and because it connects to just about anything you would need for your job.