John Heidemann / Software / JDB / JDB (old)

JDB is a package of commands for manipulating flat-ASCII databases from shell scripts. JDB is useful to process medium amounts of data (with very little data you'd do it by hand, with megabytes you might want a real database). JDB is very good at doing things like:

Rather than hand-code scripts to do each special case, JDB provides higher-level functions.

JDB is built on flat-ASCII databases. By storing data in simple text files and processing it with pipelines it is easy to experiment (in the shell) and look at the output. The original implementation of this idea was /rdb, a commercial product described in the book ``UNIX relational database management: application development in the UNIX environment'' by Rod Manis, Evan Schaffer, and Robert Jorgensen (and also at their web page). JDB is an incompatible re-implementation of their idea without any accelerated indexing or forms support. (But it's free!).

For more information, see the README file or download JDB 2.11 (released 23-Sep-08): Jdb-2.11.tar.gz, and in RPM format perl-Jdb-2.11-1.noarch.rpm, perl-Jdb-2.11-1.src.rpm.

Alternatively: download Jdb-current.tar.gz, perl-Jdb-current.noarch.rpm, perl-Jdb-current.src.rpm to get the same thing with an unchanging link.

Warning: the 2.0 series is an incompatible change from 1.x, and I still expect some format and API changes. The 2.7 release is feature-complete except for a global header change. I expect a non-beta 2.x release in August, 2008. However, I now recommend 2.7 over 1.15.

For announcements and discussion about JDB, please subscribe to the mailing lists: http://www.heidemann.la.ca.us/mailman/listinfo/jdb-talk jdb-announce jdb-talk.

(Download older releases in tar.gz format: 2.11, 2.10, 2.9, 2.8, 2.7, 2.6, 2.5, 2.4, 2.3, 2.2, 2.1, 2.0, 1.15, 1.14, 1.13, 1.12, 1.11, 1.10, 1.9, 1.8, 1.7, 1.6, 1.5, 1.4, 1.3, 1.2, 1.1, 1.0.)

Copyright © 1995-2016 by John Heidemann