TinyDB Julia

An extremely simple database written in the Julia Programming Language. This is a very rudimentary database and lacks many features you would expect in a production-ready system, such as indexing for fast lookups, transactions, concurrency control, error handling, data integrity checks, and more. It is intended to be used for small projects where you need a database but don't want to deal with the overhead of setting up a full-fledged database.

Installation

Since this is a simple project, there is no installation process per se. You just need to clone the repository and ensure you have Julia installed on your system.

git clone https://github.com/erictherobot/tinydb-julia.git

Usage

This project provides a TinyDB struct that represents the database and store and retrieve functions to interact with the database.

Here is a basic example:

include("src/TinyDB.jl")

# create a new database
db = TinyDB("mydb.txt")

# store a key-value pair in the database
store(db, "Hello", "World")

# retrieve the value for a given key
println(retrieve(db, "Hello"))  # prints "World"

The database is stored in a text file. The file format is very simple: each line contains a key-value pair separated by a colon. For example, the following file contains two key-value pairs:

Running the Example

To run the example, use the following command:

julia example.jl

This will create a database file called mydb.txt and store the key-value pair "Hello": "World" in the database. It will then retrieve the value for the key "Hello" and print it to the console.

Tests

This project includes a small set of tests. You can run the tests with the following command:

julia test/runtests.jl

which should produce the following output:

Test Summary: | Pass  Total  Time
TinyDB Tests  |    3      3  0.1s

These tests verify basic functionality such as storing and retrieving key-value pairs, and overwriting existing keys with new values. They also test that the database file is created if it does not already exist.

Future Work

While this project is intentionally simple, there are many ways it will be extended:

• Add error handling: Currently, if an error occurs during a file operation, the program will crash. It would be better to catch these errors and handle them gracefully.
• Support more data types: Right now, this database can only store strings. It would be useful to support other data types, such as integers, floats, and booleans.
• Indexing: To improve lookup speed, an index could be added. This would be especially beneficial for large databases.
• Transactions: Adding support for transactions would make the database more robust and allow for complex operations that involve multiple reads and writes.
• Concurrency control: If multiple processes are accessing the database at the same time, there is a risk of data corruption. Adding concurrency control would prevent this.
• Data integrity checks: It would be useful to add some sort of checksum to the database file to ensure that it has not been corrupted.
• More tests: The test suite could be expanded to cover more functionality and edge cases.
• Benchmarks: It would be interesting to compare the performance of this database to other databases.
• Documentation: This project could benefit from more documentation, including a description of the database format and how to use the database.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change.

Author

Eric David Smith