orrinfacey01: A note on Database Events

Sunday, July 17, 2011

A note on Database Events

Database Events.app (one of the scriptable background apps that appeared in Tiger) is intended to give some basic access to the sqlite3 database system. It has been generally maligned as a not-too-useful app, and in fact I am one of the people who has maligned it that way. But while playing around with it today I discovered that it is actually much more powerful than anyone seems to realize. Thus, a quick hint to clue everyone in.

First, don't set your hopes too high: DE is not a full-featured SQL processor. There are no tables, no meta-structures, not even a built-in sorting system. The database DE makes is just a simple flat list of records with fields, much like single-page spreadsheet. So for instance, you build up a dataset like follows (this creates a database and populates it with random data): ...