Just a Theory

Managing Key/Value Pairs in PostgreSQL

Let's say that you've been following the latest research in key/value data storage and are interested in managing such data in a PostgreSQL database. You want to have functions to store and retrieve pairs, but there is no natural way to represent pairs in SQL. Many languages have hashes or or data dictionaries to fulfill this role, and you can pass them to functional interfaces. SQL's got nothin’. In PostgreSQL, have two options: use nested arrays (simple, fast) or use a custom composite data type (sugary, legible).

PGXN Blog and Twitterstream

I crated the PGXN Blog yesterday. Tune in there for news and announcements. I’ll also be posting status reports once development gets underway, so that all you fans out there can follow my progress. Once the site is done (or at 1.0 anyway), the blog will be used for announcements, discussion of support issues, etc. So tune in!

Introducing MyTAP

As often happens, I was asked at OSCON whether something like pgTAP exists for MySQL. But this time I was asked by MySQL Community Manager Giuseppe Maxia, who also said that he’d tried to create a test framework himself (a fellow Perl hacker!), but that it wasn’t as nice as pgTAP. Well, since I was at OSCON and tend to like to hack on side projects while at conferences, and since I hoped that Giuseppe will happily take it over once I’ve implemented the core, I started hacking on it myself. And today, I’m pleased to announce the release of MyTAP 0.01 (downloads).

Important Announcement at OSCON Next Week

A sneak peak at what I'm working on for my tutorial session at OSCON. Be there at 8:30 Monday morning for the important details. You're sure to find my new venture exciting—perhaps the most important social media announcement of 2010. You can't afford to miss that, can you?

PGXN Development Project

I'm pleased to announce the launch of the PGXN development project. I've written a detailed specification and pushed it through general approval on pgsql-hackers. I've written up a detailed project plan and estimated things at a highly reduced PostgreSQL Experts rate to come up with a fundraising goal: $25,000. And now, thanks to founding contributions from myYearbook.com, and PostgreSQL Experts, we have started the fundraising phase of the project.

Atom Sources

I'm working on a project where I aggregate entries from a slew of feeds into a single feed. The output feed will be a valid Atom feed, and of course I want to make sure that I maintain all the appropriate metadata for each entry I collect. The element seems to be exactly what I need:

Handling Multiple Exceptions

I ran into an issue with DBIx::Connector tonight: SQLite started throwing an exception from within a call to rollback(): “DBD::SQLite::db rollback failed: cannot rollback transaction – SQL statements in progress”. This is rather annoying, as it ate the underlying exception that led to the rollback.

Anna Turns Five

Fuck Typing LWP

I'm working on a project that fetches various files from the Internet via LWP. I wanted to make sure that I was a polite user, such that my app would pay attention to Last-Modified/If-Modified-Since and ETag/If-None-Match headers. And in most contexts I also want to respect the robots.txt file on the hosts to which I'm sending requests. So I was very interested to read chromatic’s hack for this very issue. I happily implemented two classes for my app, MyApp::UA, which inherits from LWP::UserAgent::WithCache, and MyApp::UA::Robot, which inherits from MyApp::UA but changes LWP::UserAgent::WithCache to inherit from LWP::UARobot:

PGAN Bikeshedding

Help me pick a good name for the PostgreSQL extension distribution network and site.

Defend Against Programmer Mistakes?

I got email from a user of DBIx::Connector asking if I could change the module to make it simpler to diagnose when a user returns from a code reference using next instead of return. I'm not sure I want to get into the business of defending against programmer mistakes like this in DBIx::Connector module. What do you think?

Execute SQL Code on Connect

I’ve been writing a fair bit of PL/Perl for a client, and one of the things I’ve been doing is eliminating a ton of duplicate code by creating utility functions in the %_SHARED hash. This is great, as long as the code that creates those functions gets executed at the beginning of every database connection. So I put the utility generation code into a single function, called prepare_perl_utils(). It looks something like this:

Bricolage 2.0 Drops

Bricolage 2.0 was released today. This is a pretty big deal, and a long time coming. The most important changes, from my point of view, are:

No more USE_PGXS=1?

I'm tired of having to remember to set USE_PGXS=1 when building third-party PostgreSQL extensions like pgTAP. Aren’t you? I therefore submit a modest proposal for avoiding this unfortunate idiom.

Pod: Now with Sane Web Links

A couple months ago, RJBS and I collaborated on adding a new feature to Pod: sane URL links. For, well, ever, the case has been that to link to URLs or any other scheme: links in Pod, You had to do something like this: