Programming the Perl DBI

Standing Stones and the Sample Database

Our small example databases throughout this chapter will contain information on megalithic sites within the UK. A more complex version of this database is used in the following chapters.

The main pieces of information that we wish to store about megaliths^[7] are the name of the site, the location of the site within the UK, a unique map reference for the site, the type of megalithic setting the site is (e.g., a stone circle or standing stone), and a description of what the site looks like.

For example, we might wish to store the following information about Stonehenge in our database:

Name:

Stonehenge

Location:

Wiltshire, England

Map Reference:

SU 123 400

Type:

Stone Circle and Henge

Description:

The most famous megalithic site in the world, comprised of an earthen bank, or henge, and several concentric rings of massive standing stones formed into trilithons.

With this simple database, we can retrieve all sorts of different pieces of information, such as, ``tell me of all the megalithic sites in Wiltshire,'' or ``tell me about all the standing stones in Orkney,'' and so on.

Now let’s discuss the simplest form of database that you might wish to use: the flat-file database.

^[7] Storing anything on a megalith is in direct violation of the principles set forth in Appendix C. In case you missed it, we introduced megaliths in Chapter 1.