I’m happy to announce the first release of zeptodb. This code has been sitting around gathering bitdust for a while, as a part of the erstwhile Coredesktop project that I had been imagining. That project has gone nowhere, leaving this essentially finished code effectively abandoned. So, I’ve decided to dust it off and release it on its own to give it the attention that it deserves.
zeptodb is a set of tiny tools for manipulating flat (non-relational) databases. In fact, they are just minimal command-line programs around the functionality of the GDBM library. Thus, you can use them to work with any DBM database. For the uninitiated, these are effectively disk-bound hash tables. So, they consist only of key-value pairs, with fast look-up, and have little to do with the relational databases that we normally think of.
The tools were made to fit into pipelines in shell scripts so they all accept queries from stdin or from text files. Basically, if you find that you want quick data storage/retrieval in your scripts, and you don’t want the overhead of a full database, zeptodb might be of interest to you. Also, I guess if you have the need to manipulate DBM databases created by other programs, these might be useful as well.
There are three tools:
- zdbs: store records in a database file, creating it if it doesn’t exist
- zdbf: fetch records from a database file
- zdbr: remove records from a database file
That’s it…Comments welcome. smile
For more information, see the included documentation (man & info).