[Gllug] How to store configuration information ?

[Christian Smith]

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005, Wiehe, Simon wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I have a number of applications (over 100 individual apps) that require common
>configuration information plus some specific configuration information. These
>applications are distributed across multiple machine on Linux, Unix and
>Windows and are written in Java, C++ and Perl scripts.
>
>My question is does anyone have any suggestions for storing/distributing the
>config data. I want to avoid config files as this makes it tricky to move
>machines quickly and there is always the probability that the common stuff
>will not get updated in one (or more) files. We talked about using a
>relational database for this, but I am not so sure it is the ideal repository.
>There was also the suggestion of using LDAP. The data is predominantly
>name=value pairs with most values being numeric or strings. Some binary values
>may be needed.
>
>Does anyone have any suggestions on how best to store this so it is easily
>available from all platforms and languages ? Pointers to any reading
>resources, if known would be useful.


SQLite:
www.sqlite.org

Will not only store the configuration information, but allow you to query
it using SQL, and is stored in platform independent format and accessible
from a multitude of languages.

A suggested SQLite schema might be:

create table config (
	name text primary key on conflict replace,
	value text
);

Adding configuration is then simply a matter of SQL inserts. The "on
conflict replace" clause on the name field will allow you to insert with
impunity, overwriting existing values.

You'll want to use SQLite V3 if you want to store BLOBs.

I did a talk on SQLite at a GLLUG meeting last year. The slides can be
found at:
http://www.codex.net/~csmith/SQLite/presentation/sqlite_talk.sxi

>
>Thanks
>
>Simon
>
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