Question

I want to connect up to a database server in my .NET app and execute a database command that produces a series of database statistics. The problem is that it doesn’t return the stats in a structured format, it returns it in plain text (like a df -k command in UNIX) I can capture the output and parse it, but I was wondering if there’s a better approach to something like this.

I certainly can’t think of an alternative, but I wanted to ask around. It seems a little fragile to be parsing the command results because if the database author ever changes the format, I break.

Edit: The database is an IBM UniData database. The command is ‘file.stat’ and it returns the average record size, max record size, etc.

Answer 1

Yes, parse for the description. However, you should check the database version first.

:version Module Name         Version   Licensed UniData RDBMS............ 7.1     Yes 

That way if the file.stat data changes, you could call alternate routines.
Note: The file.stat output data has been static for sometime and is unlikely to change.

:file.stat TEST  File name                             = TEST Number of groups in file (modulo)     = 3 Static hashing, hash type             = 0 Block size                            = 2048 Number of records                     = 12 Total number of bytes                 = 2335  Average number of records per group   = 4.0 Standard deviation from average       = 1.0 Average number of bytes per group     = 778.3 Standard deviation from average       = 286.2  Average number of bytes in a record   = 194.6 Average number of bytes in record ID  = 4.3 Standard deviation from average       = 42.3 Minimum number of bytes in a record   = 113 Maximum number of bytes in a record   = 270  Minimum number of fields in a record  = 66 Maximum number of fields in a record  = 80 Average number of fields per record   = 72.7 Standard deviation from average       = 6.5 The actual file size in bytes         = 8192.