Databases Homework 3: Perl & Oracle

Databases Homework 3

Perl & Oracle

The Example:

This part of the Homework 3 assgnment will introduce you to communicating with the Oracle database from your Perl script.

First, take a look at our example perl script. This would be a good starting point (just save a copy in your own directory). It has step-by-step comments and shows you how to:

Print a HTML form out to the user
Read in input from the HTML form
Do a SELECT from the database and access that information in Perl
Do an INSERT into the database using input from the user's HTML form

You will also need to download the cgi-lib.pl library for dealing with cgi forms in Perl. Copy this file and the example.pl script into your:

~/public_html/cgi-bin

... directory on hops/barley/dbase/ugrad*. You will then need to type:

chmod 755 ~/public_html/cgi-bin/*.pl

... to make the two scripts runnable. Then you will also need to make your home directory, public_html directory and cgi-bin directory group executable so the web server can run your script:

chmod g+x ~/
chmod g+x ~/public_html
chmod g+x ~/public_html/cgi-bin

Then, look at the comments in the top of example.pl and create the following table in your table space, using sql*plus:

CREATE TABLE user_info (
   login VARCHAR2(15),
   name VARCHAR2(30),
   email VARCHAR2(80),
   primary key (login));

You will also need to change the username and password variables in the top of the script to your username & password for Oracle. Once the files are in place, the table is created, and your username and password are set, you can try running the script by going to:

http://dbase.cs.jhu.edu:8080/cgi-bin/cgiwrapd/USERNAME/example.pl

Where USERNAME is your hops/barley/ugrad*/dbase username.

Take a look at the script in action, in my directory at: http://dbase.cs.jhu.edu:8080/cgi-bin/cgiwrapd/catalina/example.pl