PHP and flat file database?

Anon

Hello,
I am hoping some one out there has had a similar requirement and might know of a workaround. I am trying to create a few very simple web pages that store information into one very basic table. I want to be able to search and retrieve an instance in this table based on one entry (a MAC address). Now I know I could set up a MySQL server, or Postgres ... etc server but to me that seems WAY over kill. If I was doing this with a M$ server and Access this would be very straight forward and could be done without setting up a server. Does anyone know of something similar for PHP. I have looked at the berkley DB access and the DBII access but they do not look like they are searchable. Thanks for your help.

Mark

junebug

if you are looking for a little database you could give msql a try. but if it really is a very small amount of data i don't see why a flat file wouldn't work. just remember that the bigger it gets, the worse your performance will get.

robertjackson

If it's not too complicate a table and not too many records, perhaps you could just read and/or write a comma seperated file with the data or a serialized array. When required, the data could be loaded into an array for searching and/or modifcation.

Look at php.net for functions like fopen, fgetcsv and serialize along with the various array functions.

Just a thought.

Rob

Anon

If all you need is to load, display, and save data, without needing DB search & manipulation functions, I suggest the following:
- Read your data into an array from a text file to get started
- Serialize the data (serialize function), and save it out to the file
- Then use the read and unserialize functions to access the data.

The task of file and data formatting is dealth with my the PHP functions, and you can focus on manipulating and displaying the data.

I do this for a simple site of my own; I can provide you with example code if you want.

Anon

Hmmm Well I guess I made this sound too simple, there is some small amount of manipulation that needs to occur. Although I guess serializing it and loading it into array would probbably work, I was hoping to find a slightly more "ellegant" way of doing this that would be expandable at a latter date. Thanks for your help.

Anon

Perhaps your needs are more complicated than I gather from your post, but perhaps you could use a "named" array, so that your 'search' queries are the indexes of the array.

That is, data_array["MAC_val"] = "val".
Serialize that.

You could write some abstracted functions for your read, write, etc functions. Then, if you move to a DB, you would just rewrite the access functions.

Besides, I think serialize is pretty elegant 🙂 The heavy lifting is done for you, and you just have to do what you want with the data.

Beyond that, there are might be some flat-file database programs in PHP; check php.resourceindex.com

Anon

Mark

Have a look at: http://dbx.idya.net/

They have a php xml database, that can be queried using simple sql statements.

Andy