Does anyone use SQL for research stuff?

Nature Talk
1

does anyone use SQL for research stuff? if so, which implementation of it do you use?

i was planning to do some just-for-fun coding unrelated to iNaturalist that would leverage some sort of SQL, and i was thinking i could potentially eventually adapt it to be useful for iNaturalist purposes. just for example, maybe i could one day create something that would pull observations and associated data into multiple tables that could be exported as a single db file or possibly a single text file with the necessary statements to create the database and its data (as an alternative to the CSV export, which tries to put everything into one table).

right now i’m thinking of using SQLite (since that seems to be a popular open source dbms), but i don’t know if something like that might be commonly used by the community…

2

I use MariaDB, a non-Oracle fork of MySQL. It’s pretty painless to install and use, and interfaces with most programming languages.

3

You should clarify if your hope is to use a standalone database instance or an embedded one.

4

an embedded db is probably easier for my purposes, but i’m still curious what others are using, embedded or not.

5

I use SQLite. It’s usually included in all standard Python installations (which is my main programming language), and the single db files are highly portable. When I need GUI as well, I use PyQt, which is also very portable and has support for several SQL backends (including SQLite).