Question

Is there a way to check if DB exists using perl ? Its a quick and easy one. but im still getting used to perl and DB

Answer 1

The DBI module is a popular way access and manipulate databases in perl. Here is a short example of usage of DBI which tests a connection:

use DBI;

$user = 'donny';
$pw = 'ppp';
$dsn = 'basetest';
$dbh = DBI->connect($dsn, $user, $pw) or die "Unable to connect: $DBI::errstr\n";

The last line could also be something more like:

$dbh = DBI->connect('dbi:Oracle:',$user.'@'.$password,$dbconnectstring);

Or something similar – just edit the first parameter as makes sense.

As you can see – you’ll get unable to connect if the DB can’t be found.

Here is the documentation relevant to DBI:
http://dbi.perl.org/docs/

Sidenote: Also, note you can access sqlplus – or any command line – within a perl script. Just use backticks. It may be worth it to check that way, if you have the tools available on the machine.