DBD::AnyData 0.08

DBD::AnyData is a DBI access to XML, CSV and other formats.

SYNOPSIS

use DBI;
my $dbh = DBI->connect(dbi:AnyData(RaiseError=>1):);
$dbh->func( trains, CSV, /users/joe/cars.csv, ad_catalog);
$dbh->func( bikes, XML, [$xml_str], ad_import);
$dbh->func( cars, DBI, $mysql_dbh, ad_import);
#
# ... DBI/SQL methods to access/modify the tables cars,bikes,trains
#
print $dbh->func( cars, HTMLtable, ad_export);

or

use DBI;
my $dbh = DBI->connect(dbi:AnyData(RaiseError=>1):);
$dbh->func( Pipe, data.pipe, XML, data.xml, ad_convert);

or

(many combinations of a dozen other data formats, see below)

The DBD::AnyData module provides a DBI/SQL interface to data in many formats and from many sources.

Currently supported formats include general format flatfiles (CSV, Fixed Length, Tab or Pipe "delimited", etc.), specific formats (passwd files, web logs, etc.), a variety of other kinds of formats (XML, Mp3, HTML tables), and, for some operations, any DBI accessible database. The number of supported formats will continue to grow rapidly since there is an open API making it easy for any author to create additional format parsers which can be plugged in to AnyData.

Data in these various formats can come from local files, from remote files, or from perl data structures such as strings and arrays.

Regardless of the format or source of the data, it may be accessed and/or modified using all standard DBI methods and a subset of SQL syntax.

In addition to standard database access to files, the module also supports in-memory tables which allow you to create temporary views; to combine data from a number of sources; to quickly prototype database systems; and to display or save the data in any of the supported formats (e.g. to display data in a CSV file as an HTML table).

These in-memory tables can be created from any combination of DBI databases or files of any format. They may also be created from perl data structures which means its possible to quickly prototype a database system without any file access or rdbms backend.