Tag: sql

SQL like query on CSV and other tabular data

sameer

CSV files are ubiquitous in the programming world and most data interchange is done using the CSV format. One problem however is that you cannot quickly check for certain rows depending on a particular field criteria. As an example, say you need to find all the rows from a CSV file that has a particular value in a field. The most probable path would be to import the CSV in a spreadsheet and then process it to find the particular information.

In this post we will look into a command-line tool that allows you to query CSV data with SQL like syntax. q – Text as Data is a command line tool that allows direct execution of SQL-like queries on CSVs/TSVs (and any other tabular text files). You can look at q as a meta-tool which provides access to all the data-related tools that SQL provides (e.g. expressions, ordering, grouping, aggregation etc.), but on tabular data files.
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Creating SQL schemas with Doctrine DBAL

sameer 4 Comments

A tedious task during web development is that of database schema creation. A schema containing a few tables comprising of a small set of rows is quick, while that containing dozens of tables and large numbers of columns is a tedious process. I usually resort to a small php script with some regular expression tossed in to automatically create a schema from a text file definition. But that is a little buggy as I’ve to manually add the indexes and other small things. Now that Doctrine has released a DBAL library, this will provide a nice ability to automatically create sql schemas.
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