DBIx-FileStore Perl module that provides tools to insert, delete and manipulate files stored in a mysql database. "What!?" you say. "You're not supposed to store files directly in a database!" And I say, "Yes, friend, you're right. But sometimes you just want to anyway." I actually wrote this just to see how well it would work. The answer is that it works fine. Modulus the fact that you're storing large blobs (up to 500K) in a database. (In particular, it might make your mysql transaction logs large, if you have them enabled.) The implementation and design details are explained throughout the module's documentation; in particular see the documentation for DBIx::FileStore. In a nutshell you can copy files into and out of the database (respectively) using the commands 'fdbput' and 'fdbget'. 'fdbmv' and 'fdbrm' are also provided, along with a few other utilities in the script/ directory. The important things to note are: A) All the filenames in the filestore are in one flat address space. That is, a file like '/a/b/c.txt' is called just that, it's not in a folder called /a/b/ (although fdbls does offer some support for directory-like viewing of files with common prefixes). B) The filenames in the filestore cannot contain spaces. It's demo code after all -- we tried to keep it simple. For usage details, see the QUICKSTART section of this file (below) and the documentation for the filestore scripts in the script/ directory. For technical details, see the documentation for DBIx::FileStore and the utilities in script/ as well. There's a video demo showing use of the DBIx::FileStore command line utilities available at joshr.com/src/DBIx-FileStore/ that is provided in multiple formats. INSTALLATION See the next section for use of the DBIx::FileStore system. To install DBIx::Filestore, follow the normal perl test and install process: perl Makefile.PL (install any prerequisites it might flag) make make test sudo make install QUICKSTART Here we give a quickstart guide. We assume you've installed DBIx::FileStore as in the previous section. To get the database setup: 1) Have Mysql installed and running. You'll also DBI and DBD::mysql. 2) Choose what database, dbuser and dbpasswd you're going to use to access mysql. (DBIx-Filestore uses a table called 'files' and another called 'fileblocks' which are created in step 4. See table-definitions.sql and the documentation for DBIx::FileStore for technical details.) 3) Copy the file fdb.conf-sample to either /etc/fdb.conf or ~/.fdbrc, and edit it to specify your dbname, dbuser and dbpasswd. 4) Set up the needed tables in mysql via a command like: mysql dbname < table-definitions.sql 5) You now have the DBIx-FileStore system installed. 6) As a simple test, let's copy a file into the filestore: % cd /etc/ % fdbput hosts That copies the file '/etc/hosts' into the filestore under the name 'hosts'. You can see it in the database with fdbls: % fdbls hosts fdbls also has a few interesting options, including -h, -l, and -m, which shows the file's size, update time (in the filestore), and MD5 checksum: % fdbls -h -l -m hosts 7.44K 20101116 19:28 fp911CO8MLqOLmCGtmx7wA hosts You can view its contents via the command fdbcat: % fdbcat hosts | head -7 # /etc/hosts hardwired addresses. # DO NOT EDIT! CHANGES WILL BE OVERWRITTEN ON THE NEXT RUN OF # /home/admin/bin/setup/hosts-setup # 127.0.0.1 localhost 255.255.255.255 broadcasthost ::1 localhost We can also see some data about the files in the filestore: % fdbstat fdbstat: DB has 7623 bytes in 1 files stored in 1 blocks. Using you can use 'fdbrm' to remove files from the filestore: % fdbrm hosts For more info, see the documentation for the 'fdb*' tools: fdbcat, fdbget, fdbls, fdbmv, fdbput, fdbrm, fdbstat, and fdbtidy. fdbslurp (which is the inverse of fdbcat in that it slurps from stdin instead of printing to stdout) is left as an exercise for the reader. LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT Copyright (C) 2010 Josh Rabinowitz This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of either: the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; or the Artistic License. See http://dev.perl.org/licenses/ for more information.