NOTE: The information on this post may be outdated. We recommend looking into the up-to-date documentation at trac (internal) and ReadTheDocs.

The astrodbkit package can be used to modify an existing SQL database (such as The BDNYC Database) but it can also be used to create and populate a SQL database from scratch.

To do this, import the BDdb module and create a new database with
from astrodbkit import astrodb
dbpath = '/path/to/new_database.db'
astrodb.create_databse(dbpath)


Then load your new database with

db = astrodb.Database(dbpath)

and start adding tables! The db.table() method accepts as its arguments the table name, list of field names, and list of data types like so:

db.table('my_new_table', ['field1','field2'], ['INTEGER','TEXT'], new_table=True)

Note new_table=True is necessary to create a new table. Otherwise, it looks for an existing table to modify (which you could do as well!).

To populate your new database with data, read the documentation here or a summary at Adding Data to the BDNYC Database.

As always, I recommend the SQLite Browser for a nice GUI to make changes outside of the command line.

Happy databasing!

As you make changes to the astrodbkit repository on Github, you may find that the documentation needs updating. Luckily, we use the invaluable Sphinx and the awesome ReadTheDocs to generate the documentation so this is fairly simple.

First, make sure you update the appropriate doc strings (those informative green bits just below the function definition) as this is what Sphinx will use to generate the documentation!

Start in the top level astrodbkit directory and generate the documentation from the module docstrings with

sphinx-build docs astrodbkit -a

Then cd into the docs directory and rebuild the html files with

cd docs
make html

Now move back to the top level directory and add, commit, and push your changes to Github with something like

cd ..
git add /docs
git commit -m "Updated the documentation for methods x, y, and z."
git push origin <your_branch>

All set! Refresh the page (after a few minutes so ReadTheDocs can build the pages) and make sure everything is to your liking. Well done.

And just in case, here’s a great tutorial for getting started with Sphinx and here’s the official documentation.