🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi,

I am looking for a very simple database package/browser, so simple
that all of the messages I've seen in the various relevant newsgroups
describe products that are much too complicated for what I want
to do.  Let me describe what I need, and I hope that someone
out there has seen or written something close to it.

I am evaluating options for a database browser which needs to
keep track of experimental or experimentally-determined parameters.
The database itself can be extremely simple; in fact at the moment,
we are using a simple ASCII file to hold all these parameters.

My ideal database and browser would meet the following criterion:

1) it must be able to save the actual database in some format
   which could be simply read by a Fortran program.  This program
   is the primary end-user of the database.  It needs all these
   parameters as it analyzes experimental data and converts these
   data to physical observables.  The parameters in the database
   determine the transformation from data->observable.  An ASCII
   file with some predictable format, or a Fortran API, is
   sufficient.

2) The browser allows users to do some flexible searching on a parameter
   name, so that they do not have to navigate an interminable menu system.

3) some sort of object-orientation is nice.  there are some sets of
   parameters that naturally go together, such as the coefficients
   of transfer matrices which determine the optical properties of
   a spectrometer.  I would like to be able to move some set of
   associated parameters in and out of the database as a group.
   This means that one would like the capability of having a subset
   of the database also be a valid database from the point of view of
   the browser; I could copy such a set out of one database (being
   used, say, by a calibration program) and then import it into
   another database (that second DB containing lots of other
   parameters which have already been determined by other means.)

4) some facility for adding comments to the database would be
   nice, so that the database would be to some extent self-documenting.

5) A flexible means of adding fields to the database and modifying the
   grouping structure.  An embedded scripting or extension language
   might also come in handy; you never know what you'd want to
   do in the future.

6) As far as I know, network access is not a big deal (many of the
   database posts I see seem to be associated with lots of people
   using a database simultaneously over some network.)  Performance
   also should not be a big deal, since the database will be read
   in only once per instance of the program.  We would like to
   have reasonable performance for starting up the browser, since
   it might get killed and restarted frequently; so say startup
   times less than ten seconds.

I can see how one could implement such a system fairly easily using
a text-file for the DB, Python for the language (or pick your
favorite language), and Tk for the graphical interface, but it'd
be a lot of work, and I can't believe that noone has ever made
something like this!  Please, if you know of something like this,
send me an email so we can discuss it.

						JT
   

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