NAME

DBD::SQLite - Self Contained RDBMS in a DBI Driver

SYNOPSIS

use DBI;
my $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:SQLite:dbname=dbfile","","");

DESCRIPTION

SQLite is a public domain RDBMS database engine that you can find at http://www.hwaci.com/sw/sqlite/.

Rather than ask you to install SQLite first, because SQLite is public domain, DBD::SQLite includes the entire thing in the distribution. So in order to get a fast transaction capable RDBMS working for your perl project you simply have to install this module, and nothing else.

SQLite supports the following features:

Implements a large subset of SQL92

See http://www.hwaci.com/sw/sqlite/lang.html for details.

A complete DB in a single disk file

Everything for your database is stored in a single disk file, making it easier to move things around than with DBD::CSV.

Atomic commit and rollback

Yes, DBD::SQLite is small and light, but it supports full transactions!

There's lots more to it, but this is early development stages, so please refer to the docs on the SQLite web page, listed above, for SQL details.

API

The API works exactly as every DBI module does. Please see DBI for more details.

$dbh->func('last_insert_rowid')

This method returns the last inserted rowid. If you specify an INTEGER PRIMARY KEY as the first column in your table, that is the column that is returned. Otherwise, it is the hidden ROWID column. See the sqlite docs for details.

PERFORMANCE

SQLite is fast, very fast. I recently processed my 72MB log file with it, inserting the data (400,000+ rows) by using transactions and only committing every 1000 rows (otherwise the insertion is quite slow), and then performing queries on the data.

Queries like count(*) and avg(bytes) took fractions of a second to return, but what surprised me most of all was:

SELECT url, count(*) as count FROM access_log
  GROUP BY url
  ORDER BY count desc
  LIMIT 20

To discover the top 20 hit URLs on the site (http://axkit.org), and it returned within 2 seconds. I'm seriously considering switching my log analysis code to use this little speed demon!

Oh yeah, and that was with no indexes on the table, on a 400MHz PIII.

BUGS

Likely to be many, please use http://rt.cpan.org/ for reporting bugs.

AUTHOR

Matt Sergeant, matt@sergeant.org

SEE ALSO

DBI.