Would Awk be useful for end user plain text databases? I want to keep a listing of all my books but I would prefer not to use a database and to use something that works in the Unix console.
The Awk Programming Language[1], by Aho, Kernighan and Weinberger, has a whole chapter on using Awk as a relational database engine. (They implement a small query language in Awk itself.) It's also a great book period.
It teaches Awk through many practical examples, so called one-liners, that are small and short programs that just do one task. Such as joining lines, printing lines matching a pattern, summing up numbers on lines, converting text, etc.
This 'NoSQL' has absolutely no similarity to the 'NoSQL' databases of the last few years (and predates them all by many years). Instead it's a tool to manage databases of plain text files in the Unix environment. Seamlessly ties together several parts of Unix toolchain, with Awk as the centerpiece. Has surprising features, like searches with joins between tables (i.e., files).
I'll also second that the Aho Kernighan Awk book is a beautiful piece of work.
Depends on how complex the expected operations are. I think awk is absolutely essential for dealing with things like logfiles. Do you have a reason against using sqlite[1]? That works just fine in the console, doesn't need a server. You could still use awk with it, technically. For example:
Why would you want to do that? It looks like xml all over again. No advantages of user-readable format and no advantages of a real database. Talking to sqlite CLI tool is probably a little bit more useful.
XML? I keep databases in user readable/writable format that I also parse with awk. The whole point of awk is to parse human readable text. No XML nonsense. Just text with a non-rigid structure.
If you need a database, you really shouldn't allow the text to be parsed as anything else than originally intended. With "just text with a non-rigid structure" it's just too easy to make a silly mistake. So what is the advantage here, given we have bdb and sqlite on almost every machine nowadays?
Or the other way - if you need something human-readable, why use is as a database? Why not keep the data where the data belongs and generate the reports when needed from there?
