From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Sat Jan 11 20:58:31 2003
Subject: Re: How to create and use a large database in Octave?
From: Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian dot org>
To: Ananda Murthy R S <rsamurti at sancharnet dot in>
Cc: help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2003 20:58:23 -0600

On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 07:53:32AM +0530, Ananda Murthy R S wrote:
> Hello:
> 
> I am writing a program in Octave which needs to create and use a large 
> database. For this I thought of using Gnumeric spreadsheet or MySQL. How 
> to read data from these databases in Octave. Is there any better way of 
> doing this?

You can connect to SQL databases by means of hand-crafted .m or .oct files.
One relatively simple way is to, say, pass your sql query as a text string
to an .m file which then calls, say, Perl to connect to a SQL backend.
Instead of Perl you could pipe directly into tools like isql, psql, mysql, ...

I once described another way of going directly against Postgres; these pages
are still at 

    http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/octave-pg.html

One problem is that SQL has different datatypes than Octave has, so it isn't
obvious how to map them, and how to store them inside Octave. If you're
mostly after number, it shouldn't be a problem.

Dirk

-- 
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. 
				             -- Niels Bohr



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