PDBF
Documentation
Patrick Bender
s9pabend@stud.uni-saarland.de
Website:
https://github.com/uds-datalab/PDBF
Version 1.2.4
Contents
1 Bugs, Suggestions, Feature requests
2
2 Abstract
2
3 License
2
4 Getting started
3
4.1 Normal usage
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4.2 Attach a Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) le
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4.3 Attach a tar archive
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4.4 Learn how to use the PDBF framework
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5 Features
3
5.1 Automatic generation of Charts, Multiplot Charts, Pivot tables
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
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5.2 Generate your document directly from the results of your experiment
. . . . . . . . . .
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5.3 Compile LaTeX to single HTML le
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6 Build Instructions
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7 Thanks to
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8 How to use the PDBF compiler
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9 Requirements
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10 SQL speci cs and special functions
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11 Data sources
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11.1 SQL
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11.2 CSV
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12 PDBF elements
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12.1 Chart
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12.2 Multiplot Chart
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12.3 Pivot Table
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12.4 SQL
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12.5 DataText
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12.6 DataTable
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13 F.A.Q.
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1
1 Bugs, Suggestions, Feature requests
If you encounter bugs, have suggestions or have a feature request, then please go to the issue page
open a new issue if necessary and explain your concern. You can also write us an email (ichbinkeinreh
at t-online.de or jens.dittrich at cs.uni-saarland.de).
2 Abstract
PDBF documents are a hybrid format. They are a valid PDF and a valid HTML page at the same
time. You can now optionally add an Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) le with a complete operating
system to the PDBF document. Yes, this means that the resulting le is a valid PDF, HTML, and
OVA le at the same time. If you change the le extension to PDF and open it with an PDF viewer,
you can see the static part of the document. If you change the le extension to HTML and open it
with a Browser (currently Chrome/Firefox/Safari/IE 10 supported), you can see the dynamic part of
the document. And if an ova le is attached you can also change the le extension to OVA and install
and run the attached operating system.
The di erence between the PDF and the HTML version is that the PDF version contains static version
of all PDBF elements, whereas the HTML version is dynamic. For example you can zoom into graphs,
temporarly remove dataseries from the graph, inspect and change the underling query of the PDBF
element and see the result of the change directly in the browser.
This approach works completely oine. No internet connection is required, neither at compile time,
nor at viewing time.
PDBF les are created from LaTeX source code and a relational database. The raw data can ei-
ther be a SQL statement string, a le with SQL statements, or contained in a database (currently
PostgreSQL/MySQL/MariaDB supported). In the LaTeX code you can then specify how the PDBF
element (currently charts/pivot tables/multiplot charts/sql statements/dataTexts/dataTables are sup-
ported) is created from the raw data with options and an SQL query. Read more in the
documentation
,
which is itself is a PDBF document.
PDBF toolkit is written in Java and LaTeX and can be used to compile documents on Windows, Mac,
and Linux. PDBF documents are also platform independent and run on any desktop OS (Windows,
Linux, Mac) with a browser/PDF viewer.
A
demo paper
of our tool appeared at
VLDB 2015
.
3 License
This toolkit is licensed unter the MIT License. See LICENSE.md le.
2