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30. May 2012

Released: phpLiteAdmin 1.9.2 includes CSV import/export

Filed under: DBMS,PHP,phpLiteAdmin,Server Administration — Tags: , , , , , , — Christopher Kramer @ 15:54

As I wrote in March, I implemented CSV import and fixed export issues of phpLiteAdmin. This fixed phpLiteAdmin bug #71. I also wrote a small fix for bug #75. Today, new version 1.9.2 of phpLiteAdmin was released including both fixes. You can download it here.

I’d like to thank the phpLiteAdmin team for including my work and allowing me to join the team. I plan to address more issues of phpLiteAdmin in the future to push phpLiteAdmin a little further. There is still some more work to be done which I will have a look at once I find the time.

I recommend the new version to anybody using phpLiteAdmin (and also everybody who doesn’t yet ;-)). Please use the bugtracker in case you find any issues.

I hope some of you find the new features useful or are happy to see those bugs fixed.

Thanks again to the phpLiteAdmin team for the great tool and the opportunity to contribute to the project. Fortunately, I do not have to create a fork to improve the tool.

 

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13. March 2012

sqlite.js: SQLite for Javascript!

Filed under: DBMS,JavaScript — Tags: , , , , , — Christopher Kramer @ 12:01

I just found something quite cool which I thought might be interesting to some of you.

Alon Zaka created emskripten, a LLVM-to-JavaScript converter. It can convert LLVM-bytecode such as provided by compilation from C/C++ code into JavaScript. This approach seems quite cool and it already proved to produce some cool results:

He converted the SQLite-library, which is written in C, into JavaScript. You can find (and fork) the project on github or just try the demo.

The first thing that I was curious about was: How does it store the database file? Well, it creates a new database when you do SQL.open(). But you can pass data to SQL.open(data) to start with a pre-filled database. So I think using this library would normally look like this:

  1. fetch the initial database from the server (e.g using AJAX). At least DB schema and some important data.
  2. open the database with SQL.js
  3. do some operations on the database, mostly SELECTs probably
  4. maybe fetch some more data using AJAX from the server when needed
  5. maybe send some data to the server to save changes using form or ajax

So this would mean we move some more stuff to the client. It would allow us to use SQL on the client side just like we do on the server-side. So we could use the same queries for javascript-based clients on the client and for html-only-clients on the server. (But exposing SQL-queries used in the server might make SQL injection as easy as never before…)

I see two other interesting ways of using this:

  1. In combination with HTML5 local storage – this would allow to store a persistent client-side database that could be accessed using SQL. Sounds pretty cool and the main usage scenario of SQL.js for me.
  2. On the server using node.js – but when I think about it: There are better ways to access a database within node.js, so this is probably only showing that it works, but no real usage scenario.

Tell me what you think about it.

10. March 2012

phpliteadmin: CSV import and export

Filed under: DBMS,PHP,phpLiteAdmin,Server Administration — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Christopher Kramer @ 12:24

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!

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