Re: blaise and perl

The key question here, I believe, is what you forsee to be done with the data. Since you're not interfacing with the application but rather reading the files yourself, a DBD "driver" in your case would have to be a fullblown database engine, complete with SQL parser and all the dirty nitty gritty. Is such heavy duty data munging and close integration with Blaise forseeable that it makes that kind of effort worthwhile? I tend to think not so..

It would probably be better to write some Perl code to merely im- and export for these .bdb files, and dump the data in and out of a "real" database for your munging needs.

As far as reading non-textual data is concerned, Perl's unpack function is lots of very powerful magic and would fit your bill perfectly.

Makeshifts last the longest.

Comment on Re: blaise and perl

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: blaise and perl by aufrank (Pilgrim) on Jul 03, 2002 at 20:20 UTC
thanks again for the advice on unpack. unfortunately, I can't say I fully grok the documentation-- having a hard time figuring out how the templates described in pack would work in unpack. I can tell you that when I open the *.bdb file in emacs, I get lots of odd meta characters, with the data embedded within them. any guesses on what sorts of templates I should experiment with? thanks again, /au	[reply]
Re^3: blaise and perl by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Jul 03, 2002 at 20:36 UTC
`unpack` produces a list of scalars corresponding to the template. I don't know how else to help you, since your description of the data is, well, "vague" would be an euphemism. :) Try looking at the file with `hexdump`, `hexdump -c`, `strings` and the various other tools for examining raw binary data. Makeshifts last the longest.	[reply]