In case you use sqlite, a serverless, transactional SQL-complete database engine, you might also know phpliteadmin. It is a web-based DB admin tool just like phpMyAdmin is for MySQL. It is small and does not require complex installation just like sqlite. It is great to do most simple operations on a sqlite database, but in my opinion it still has some important limitations and bugs.

One thing I recently missed was the possibility to import CSV files into a SQLite database. The SQLite shell makes this very easy (if the file has the correct syntax). But this has also some limitations and you have to leave the phpLiteAdmin GUI and start a SQLite shell. So I thought it should be part of phpLiteAdmin. It already had some GUI options for CSV import, but the actual import implementation was missing, so I implemented CSV import myself. On the way testing the exported csv and importing it again I noticed some export bugs of phpliteadmin like this one and fixed them on the way.

So those are the changes I did to phpLiteAdmin:

Import:

• implemented CSV import with some features like:
• you can define Enclosure, Escaper, Null and first-row-field-description just like when exporting
• using PHP’s fgetcsv()
• can import files that were exported with phpliteadmin using the same settings!
• can even import files exported with phpliteadmin without my corrections and improvements (see below), although they are not “standard CSV”.

Export:

• removed line terminator option because:
  • this was not implemented
  • in my opinion anything else than a linebreak does not make sense, so useless feature
• Fix: Tables with indexes were exported multiple times
• Fix: Last column was terminated which is not usual in CSV
• NULLs are not enclosed anymore to allow distinction between “NULL”-text
• FIX: Removing CRLF was not implemented
• FIX: Tables that were not exported caused additional linebreaks in output

You can find anything related to these changes in phpLiteAdmin’s bug tracker.

You can also get my version with the improvements from the bugtracker or download it here.

I really hope this will make it into the next release of phpLiteAdmin, but unfortunately I did not get any feedback by the developers of phpLiteAdmin yet. Hopefully this is not getting a fork 😉

I hope you like these features and bugfixes. You can give me feedback here or in the phpliteadmin bug tracker.

I really think a good database management tool for SQLite is needed and phpLiteAdmin has the potential to become one. We will see.

You can also tell me if you use some other management tool for SQLite which you think is way better 😉

Update 2012/05/13: The phpliteadmin developers just announced that an official new version including these improvements will come up soon. Great news, I am looking forward to this new version!