Joel Rees <[email protected]> writes:
> 2014/07/07 10:39 "Joe Pfeiffer" <[email protected]>:
>>
>> Joel Rees <[email protected]> writes:
>>
>> > 2014/07/07 5:08 "Nuno Magalhães" <[email protected]>:
>> >>
>> >> On Sun, Jul 6, 2014 at 9:03 PM, kamaraju kusumanchi
>> >> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> >> > I am still exploring all the suggestions given by others. But SQLite
>> >> > looks
>> >> > very promising. There is a Perl DBI Interface to SQLite which might be
>> >> > what
>> >> > I am after.
>> >>
>> >> >> > 2) I want the data to be in text format.
>> >>
>> >> SQLite keeps data in binary files.
>> >
>> > What do you mean by that?
>>
>> Presumably, as opposed to human-readable text files.
>
> Uhm, is text not a subset of binary (when talking about the contents of the
> files that implement a database)?
> Does SQLite encode text fields in some non-human-readable manner?
>
> Okay, thinking about it a bit, the lack of delimiters, and the puzzling
> nature of binary zero when trying to
> read it as text, might be what Nuno was referring to. Comma delimited files
> provide visible, understandable
> delimiters,
>
> Oh, and the INTEGER PRIMARY KEY is never readable as TEXT.
>
> For some people seeking to keep data in text format, that might disqualify
> SQLite. Apparently not the OP?
My typical experience is that when people distinguish "text" vs
"binary" files, they mean the whole file can reasonably be made sense
of in a text editor (that's not a precise definition, of course, but I
think it serves the purpose). When I open an SQLite database I have
handy with emacs, it is rife with nulls and other non-printing
characters. Similarly, when I try to run 'less' on it, the response
is
babs:506$ less house.db
"house.db" may be a binary file. See it anyway?
Arguably, as people typically use the distinction, it's not a text
file. Yes, I can extract the text fields as human-readable ASCII,
but that does not make it a text file.
>Okay, thinking about it a bit, the lack of delimiters, and the puzzling nature
>of binary zero when trying to read it as text,
>might be what Nuno was referring to. Comma delimited files provide visible,
>understandable delimiters,
And what just about anybody else would mean by a text file, as well.
>Oh, and the INTEGER PRIMARY KEY is never readable as TEXT.
>
>For some people seeking to keep data in text format, that might
>disqualify SQLite. Apparently not the OP?
My impression (I'd have to go back and recheck) is that it
disqualified it for the OP, as well.
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected]
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
Archive: https://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
