Parsing Oracle TNS Files in Python
What? And Why? This probably seems like a really niche first post, and it is. I mean... it really is super niche. But during my one workday officially "between jobs," I decided to work on this problem because it was something that would have been really useful over the past few years. Lots of companies use Oracle databases, especially those with legacy enterprise IT infrastructure. Some companies have thousands of database instances, potentially across many data centers, geographical regions, and even hosted on-premise or in the cloud. Why so many database instances? A lot of companies use the Development, [System Integration Testing,] User Acceptance Testing, Production deployment strategy for quality assurance for each database. This means that a big company that already might have thousands of databases used for specific organizations (e.g., different areas of research, HR, sales, manufacturing, etc.) and apps (e.g., specific inventory management software) can multiply th...