I use ETL::Yertl a lot. Despite its present unpolished state, it contains some important, easy-to-use tools that I need to get my work done. For example, this week I got an e-mail from Slaven (a CPAN tester and a tireless reporter of CPAN issues found by testing) saying that some records were missing from one the APIs on CPAN Testers: The fast-matrix had 3300 records for the "forks" distribution version 0.36, but the matrix had only 300 records. The utilities in ETL::Yertl made it easy to find and manipulate the data I needed to diagnose this problem.

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Originally posted on blogs.perl.org -- Managing SQL Data with Yertl

Every week, I work with about a dozen SQL databases. Some are Sybase, some MySQL, some SQLite. Some have different versions in dev, staging, and production. All of them need data extracted, transformed, and loaded.

DBI is the clear choice for dealing with SQL databases in Perl, but there are a dozen lines of Perl code in between me and the operation that I want. Sure, I've got modules and web applications and ad-hoc commands and scripts that perform certain individual tasks on my databases, but sometimes those things don't quite do what I need right now, and I just want something that will let me execute whatever SQL I can come up with.

Yertl (ETL::Yertl) is a shell-based ETL framework. It's under development (as is all software), but included already is a small utility called ysql to make dealing with SQL databases easy.

Continue reading Managing SQL Data with Yertl...