Question

I have to read data from some files and insert the data into different tables in a database. Is Unix shell script powerful enough to do the job?

Is it easy to do the job in shell script or should I go about doing this in Java?

Answer 1

If the data you are trying to import is in a reasonable format — comma-delimited, for example — and your database server has reasonable command line utilities, this should be no problem. MySQL has the ‘mysqlimport’ command-line tool that will accept various arguments describing the format of the file:

mysqlimport \     --fields-terminated-by=, \     --ignore-lines=1 \     --fields-optionally-enclosed-by=''' < datafile.txt 

Passing the data through perl/sed/awk one-liners can help with getting it in the proper format, and the shell script can easily handle prompting for filenames, handling arguments, etc.

Using the various command-line tools provided by Unix is the entire point of bash scripting. Perl, mysql, etc. are all part of that toolkit.