For what it is worth, I took over primary programming responsibilities for a Sybase database about 8 years ago, and dealt with an existing C interface as well as some perl scripts. I found the perl MUCH easier to work with. We still use the C code, but it has become less important as time goes by.

When I started, Sybase was at version 4.8, Perl at 4.x. With the addition of the DBI module, as well as the nice features that came in with 5.x, I have been able to retire a lot of home-grown code in favor of easily maintained, standardized code that has scaled extremely well over the past few years.

Bottom Line -- for DBA tasks, web interfaces, parsing of text files, extraction of data, and nearly everything else do as a DBA -- Perl is the number one choice.

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"Computeri non cogitant, ergo non sunt"