I have to say, using the sqlite3 api, it all made perfect sense to me, except that these very functions were missing. The silent create-if-needed behavior of Open() seems counter-intuitive to me. I would think that many consumers would have to do what I did: examine the file system themselves to determine if the file already exists, etc, to get their setup logic right.
--Ned. -----Original Message----- From: Darren Duncan [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 08, 2004 1:23 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [sqlite] new Ticket 949: add user-level test for file validity At 12:22 PM +1000 10/8/04, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >Darren, >Are you asking for a pragma integrity_check (which already exists) or are >you just wanting to verify the magic string at the beginning of the file? The magic string. I want an elegant way for a user to explicitly check the magic string, that is built into the SQLite library itself, and which means not issuing a superflous select. >Personally, I think it would be nice to have some means to say "Open this >file if it already exists and is an sqlite file: Don't create it if it >doesn't exist". I'm not sure I've found any cases where it is entirely >necessary, though. >Benjamin. You're absolutely right. In fact, I very much want that too. 1. I want a command that is explicitly for creating a new file, that will fail with an error if the file already exists. 2. I want a command that is explicitly for opening an existing file, that will fail with an error if the file does not exist. 3. While we're at it, maybe an explicit built-in command to delete a database (done by the SQLite library since it knows best how to clean up after itself). Perhaps an elegant solution for this and similar things be to add a third argument to open() called "mode" which simply takes one of a list of defined numerical codes (or alternately, a single bitmask) representing the behaviour we want. Example values could be: 1. "new or fail"; 2. "existing or fail"; 3. "new or existing" (the default). Possibly the thing about checking the magic number could be a fourth and fifth option (to complement 2 and 3), unless that is simply asked for separately. Any thoughts on this idea? -- Darren Duncan
