Caro-COOPS.org Discussion Board

jcothran · Joined: 24 Feb 2025 Posts: 176 Location: Columbia, SC

One of the technical discussion topics yesterday centered around the idea of doing file processing without using a relational database. This is a radical idea to me as most projects I've been involved with are usually oriented towards taking disorganized data stored in files and organizing the data into some sort of table structure which can be queried via SQL. XML is a variation on this concept with the data stored as text readable files in a specifed schema where there's a design trade off between storage/processing efficiencies against simplicity and readability. XML is also working toward SQL like functionality with the still evolving XQuery specification.

Another option which we might want to consider in all of this is SQLite http://www.sqlite.org/ which is 'a C library that implements an embeddable SQL database engine'

What this really means is that its a C library for working with a file or set of files which emulates much of the SQL functionality(click here http://www.sqlite.org/omitted.html to see the features not supported).

Perl implements SQLite in the DBD::SQLite module as talked about in this link
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2003/09/03/perlcookbook.html?page=1

SQLite represents another design possibility in that it keeps the usefulness of SQL for data querying and management without requiring a fully implemented relational database system.

additional SQLite articles
http://www.linux-mag.com/cgi-bin/printer.pl?issue=2003-10&article;=compile

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6650

also of interest
DBD::CSV
http://search.cpan.org/~jzucker/DBD-CSV-0.2002/lib/DBD/CSV.pm

SQL::Statement
http://search.cpan.org/~jzucker/SQL-Statement-1.005/lib/SQL/Statement.pm