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UnixReview.com
May 2007
Regular Expressions: Good Works with Real Databases
by Cameron Laird and Kathryn Soraiz
We have a suggestion: Next time you aim to learn a new
software technology – a language like Ruby or Eiffel,
a display framework like Ajax or wxPython, or so on – assign yourself the task of
sanitizing the databases around you. If your experience
is at all like ours, you'll find this very rewarding.
Databases are central
Your usual development or administrative work probably relies on
databases. We mean "database" here rather abstractly – perhaps
customer records in an instance of Oracle, but maybe a collection
of all the email ever received at your company or a file of
every recipe that ever interested you or all the parts in a
C-47 Skytrain or characteristics of the sporadic groups.
We're fairly sure there is something like this in your
programming life. Databases are important; some of them
represent the principal net value of big corporations whose
names you recognize. It's a crucial fact about information
technology (IT) in modern society that databases
matter, even to the extent that non-technical executives and
managers recognize their centrality.<>
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