Eric Day

Boots: A Modular CLI for Databases

Back in October I wrote about a student group I was sponsoring to create a new command line tool for Drizzle. The group wrapped up their part of the project (the term ended), and we now have a new tool called Boots! A few of the developers are still active in the project, and I’m planning to get involved more as well. We also have a couple students interested in hacking on it for Drizzle’s Google Summer of Code.

Boots is written in Python and aims to replace the the previous ‘drizzle’ tool (which was modified from the ‘mysql’ command line tool). It doesn’t support everything that the old tool has yet (like tab completion), but it adds some new features. For example, there are multiple ‘lingos’, or modular languages, that can be used to communicate with the shell. This allows you to use plain SQL, Python, or even LISP to interact with the shell. One of the lingos, piped-sql, lets you do interesting things such as:

shell$ boots -u root -h 127.0.0.1 -l pipedsql
Boots (v0.2.0)
127.0.0.1:3306 (server v5.1.40)
> SELECT * FROM mysql.user; | csv_out("users.csv")
5 rows in set (0.06s server | +0.00s working)
> Boots quit.
shell$ cat users.csv
localhost,root,,Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,Y,,,,,0,0,0,0
...

It’s ready to use, so download and install it now! If you have any features you would like to see, please get in touch through the Boots blueprints, mailing list, or #boots IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. One of the original developers from the project, Chromakode (the same from the awesome xkcd.com shell), will also be attending the MySQL Conference & Expo next week and helping out with the Drizzle booth. Come find one of us to talk more about the project there!

2 Responses to "Boots: A Modular CLI for Databases"

1. Henrik Ingo says:

   April 9, 2010 at 7:35 am

   *drooling* piped-sql *drooling*

   I like the name. It opens up a whole new universe of naming opportunities for Drizzle tools. I think I will hack on Umbrella on my vacation. It’s nice that my feet don’t get wet in the rain, but an Umbrella is to protect your hairdo.

   I don’t know… ;-)
2. Jay Pipes says:

   April 9, 2010 at 10:19 am

   This is going to revolutionize how people use the command line client. :)

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