Thunderstone Search Appliance Manual

Configuration Overview

DBWalker uses multiple individual configurations for the different databases and tables it needs to talk to. Each configuration describes a single group of settings for a single table in a single database. It is possible to have multiple configurations use the same table and databases - for example, you can have one configuration list the entire contents of a table, while another configuration limits the data to a certain range.

Each configuration specifies which database to talk to with a type ("PostgreSQL", "Oracle", etc., which determines what JDBC driver to use), a JDBC connection string (which specifies things like host, port, and database), a username, and a password. The configuration must also specify which table is to be read, and can optionally specify which columns to read (defaults to all), any filter for the data (by way of a WHERE clause), and a key field.

If no key field is specified, then DBWalker won't know how to uniquely identify rows, so it will print all the data on a single HTML page. If a key field is specified, then DBWalker will create an index page, which lists only the key field column. Each row's key field is listed as a link back to DBWalker, which will give a page displaying all of the selected fields of only that record. This allows more fine-grained indexing and searching in large tables.