The miniDB project is a minimal and easy to expand and develop for RMDBS tool, written exclusivelly in Python 3. MiniDB's main goal is to provide the user with as much functionality as possible while being easy to understand and even easier to expand. Thus, miniDB's primary market are students and researchers that want to work with a tool that they can understand through and through, while being able to implement additional features as quickly as possible.

Python 3.9 or newer is needed. To download the project locally, run:

git clone https://github.com/DataStories-UniPi/miniDB.git
cd miniDB

To install the needed dependencies if you are using pip, run:

pip install -r requirements.txt

If your are using Anaconda, run:

conda env create -f environment.yml

Then, to activate/deactivate the environement, run:

conda activate/deactivate mdb

If you have other python versions already installed, using Anaconda is adviced since it allows you to manage multiple python versions easily.

These commands will install the following dependencies:

• tabulate (for text formatting)
• prompt_toolkit (for sql compiler input)
• graphviz (for graph visualizations; optional)
• matplotlib (for plotting; optional)

Linux users will need to install the Graphviz package to visualize graphs:

sudo apt-get install graphviz

Installation instructions for non-Linux users can be found here.

The file documentation.pdf contains a detailed description of the miniDB library.

To create a database called "smdb" containing the smallRelations tables and get an interactive shell, run

DB=smdb SQL=sql_files/smallRelationsInsertFile.sql python3.9 mdb.py

You can then access the database that is saved. You can either open an interactive interpreter with the following command:

DB=smdb python3.9 mdb.py

or run a specific sql file with multiple commands using the following syntax:

DB=smdb SQL=YOUR_FILE python3.9 mdb.py

George S. Theodoropoulos, Yannis Kontoulis, Yannis Theodoridis; Data Science Lab., University of Piraeus.