Re: How to package a database (not program)?
On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 11:06:51PM -0800, David Braun wrote:
> The data comes from the USDA as a file designed to be imported into a
> relational database (such as MySQL). It's really not very useful
> otherwise. My question is how do I package this correctly? I want my
> package to import it into a database, but I don't want to dictate to the
> user which database program to use. Something appropriate might be for
> the configure script to ask the user for the name of a SQL server, along
> with a user name and a password. I'm not sure this would be sufficient,
> though, because as a new student of SQL I'm learning there's no standard
> way of creating a database (horror!). So maybe this would mean the
> package would have to look for local client drivers of MySQL,
> PostgreSQL, etc.
Not only that, the data types often vary for different databases, though
hopefully your data is simple enough that this isn't a problem.
I would simply include the SQL dump under /usr/share and leave it to the
user where to import it. It's possible that they will want to create a new
database, or import it into an existing one (perhaps even with different
table names), or transform it from SQL into something else.
--
- mdz
Reply to: