OT: database advice

[Duncan Lithgow]

On Sun, 2005-04-24 at 23:40 -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 24, 2005 at 23:08:39 +0200,
>   Duncan Lithgow <duncan at lithgow-schmidt.dk> wrote:
> > Okay, so different db's store data differently, fair enough, how can i
> > save a copy of the db contents though, and in what format should I do
> > that.
> 
> What are you trying to protect against? Normal practice is to either
> do consistant snapshots of the live database using database specific
> tools or shut the database down and do a file system backup.
okay, so how does one do a snapshot? are there opensource tools for
this?

> > I believe it can be done with a csv list, but that sounds a bit foolish
> > to me. There must be a better way.
> 
> Actually csv (or tsv) is a reasonable way to represent the data in a
> relational database. This won't capture information about the structure
> of the database. This would include datatypes of the data, constraints and
> triggers.
I thought they give problems when the data includes commas? Is there
some mechanism I don't understand? If I understand you correctly this
way of taking a snapshot does not preserve structure, only data. So it
would involve some scripting to put it back into a database. Is that
right?

thanks for your response, Duncan