silent11 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I want to play around with DBI and HTML::Template, however I don't want to go to the trouble of creating table FOO then populating it with bogus data just for testing purposes. Yes, I'm that lazy! Plus I'd rather play around with actual data.

Are there public databases available for download on the net? Straight SQL (like an sqldump) would be best format I guess, I'm using MySQL.

any ideas would be appreciated.

-silent11

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: OT - Test Database
by dga (Hermit) on Aug 05, 2003 at 22:06 UTC

    You should be able to coerce any multi column text file, say one having zip codes and city state information etc. into a simple table in MySQL via the text importing function. Then you could have a simple webpage template with a TMPL_LOOP which read in the zip code or (leading) part of a zipcode and tabled out the city state pair(s) as requested.

    This would excersize all the basic functions of both tools for a web retrieval driven by a database.

    You would of course need to create a 3 or 4 column table to read the text into...

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Re: OT - Test Database
by pfaut (Priest) on Aug 06, 2003 at 23:20 UTC

    Some ideas...

    Look through the stuff that came with your database software. Most databases come with some small database to use with example code or for testing purposes.

    Write some code to use the XML interface to PerlMonks. Save the data you collect to a database you create from the information provided through the interface. This way you can sharpen your LWP/XML skills as well. Just make sure you keep the volume down or run at off-peak times.

    Use another site's RSS feed as alternative to the above.

    90% of every Perl application is already written. ⇒
    dragonchild
[reply]

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