An Improved Approach for Generating Configuration Files from a Database

Abstract

Much of our site configuration information is stored in a relational database, which means we need to extract this information in the appropriate format for servers and daemons. In the past we have done this with lots of little custom C programs and scripts. We have recently changed to a new approach of generating the files within the database itself using PL/SQL packages, and then using a generic file extraction program to handle the details of putting ASCII characters into Unix (or other) file systems. This has allowed us to reduce development time of programs to generate new file types, and greatly simplified supporting multiple platforms.