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collection of plain text files as a database
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Posted by JohnK
Jun 16, 2011 at 12:54 PM
You don’t need to be a programmer to put this kind of thing together yourself.
Many years ago I got bored waiting for my employer to buy a long-promised database for our newspaper reporters and photographers to use as a photo job order/record system.
So I Googled and found a few bits of open-source code that would collect the data from a web form and pour it into a plain text database. Not separate files in this case, just a single plain text file with delimiters.
I had to learn enough Perl to add a couple of lines of code to add a feature (sorting, I think). Took an hour or two, it’s not rocket science. Most of my own effort was in designing the web forms/pages to input and view/filter the data, which was straightforward, if you’ve done a little HTML. Then I just had to persuade the IT guys to give me a little server space (I was a journalist on the paper)...
Plain text files are fairly robust, so long as data volumes are modest. That $0 database was bullet-proof, even if I say so myself. Crude, but effective, as they say. The very fancy and very pretty $10,000 “pro” database system we eventually bought to replace it kept falling over! There’s a lesson there somewhere…
There’s a whole world of code “snippets” on there on the web, much of it open source, that will do the work for you, you just need to knit it together. And it’s a nice challenge.