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Project Description

DBToy is a fuse-based filesystem for Linux, that lets you browse the contents of a relational database through a set of directories and xml files.

You will see a directory for every schema in your db, each containing a directory for every table. In the “table” dirs there are a couple of files with the table’s definition and data.

The xml files can be processed through stylesheets to obtain other output formats.

DBToy is licensed under the GPL, and comes with no warranty.

Documentation

Compiling the sources

To build dbtoy just run the makeall.sh script in the folder where you extracted the sources.

The script looks for the mysql and postgres client libraries and enable the corresponding drivers. If you want to choose yourself then run make defining MYSQL_DRV, POSTGRESQL_DRV or both. Ex.

[user@testlinux]$ make MYSQL_DRV=1

The output of make will be an executable called dbtoy.

Mounting a filesystem

When running dbtoy, two options are mandatory: the username to connect to database and the database type (mysql or postresql). Moreover you need to specify the mount point. For instance, to connect to a local mysql database you could run:

[user@testlinux]$ dbtoy -u username -d mysql /mnt/dbtoy

More options are available, running dbtoy without arguments will show a brief help.
What can I do now?

• Walk through the filesystem
  Each schema has its own directory, containing one subdirectory for every table. Inside the dirs there are two xml files: one with the description of the datatypes and another with the data.
• Process the data
  Being xml files, the files can be further processed with standard tools, e.g. you can get an HTML report using an XSLT transformation.
• Read a subset of a table, “querying” a file
  Simple queries can be performed using a url-like syntax: append a question mark and your expression to the file name, using the form field=value. Ex:

[user@testlinux]$ cat test_schema/user/data?id<10

(Be warned: this feature is still experimental.)

Other documentation

See the User Manual

Copyright and license

DBToy is Copyright © 2003 – 2010 Domenico Rotiroti.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, version 3 of the License.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  
See the GNU General Public License for more details.
A copy of the GNU General Public License is included in the source
distribution of this software.