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@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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
