Comma Separated Values

The CSV driver allows Rekall to directly access data stored in comma-separated-value files. You should bear in mind however that this is not really a "database" and that there are a lot of restrictions. The main use of this driver is as an alternative to the CSV data copier; note that the driver is read-only, so files cannot be updated.

Rekall treats a set of CSV files (ie., those files whose name ends with .csv) in a particular directory as the "database"; the directory is specified in the database setting of the database connection. The name of the file, with the .csv suffix stripped, is used as the table name.

There are three settings under the advanced tab. The delimiter and the qualifier provide the usual separator values, and default to the comma character and single quotes respectively. The header setting specifies whether the first line in the file is treated as column names; if not then the columns are named column1, column2, etc.

Currrently, the SQL which can be used with the CSV driver is extremely limited. You can use where conditions, but group, having and order are not supported. Select queries may only contain a single table (ie., table join is not supported). Only very basic expressions are possible; basic operations like addition and subtraction, and comparisoms. There are no automatic type conversions and all columns appear as strings. Type conversion is available via the tochar, toint and todouble functions.

If is hoped to extend the SQL to be the same as supported by the XBase driver in a future release.