Just a Theory

Sqitch on Oracle

I found myself with a little unexpected time at work recently, and since we use Oracle (for a few more months), I decided to port Sqitch. Last night, I released v0.970 with full support for Oracle. I did the development against an 11.2 VirtualBox VM, though I think it should work on 10g, as well.

Rationality and Faith

I got an invitation to write on Medium a couple weeks ago. I have been pondering some more philosophical posts lately, so I thought I’d try posting there. My first post, “Misguided Delusion,” tries to pull apart the the false dichotomy between faith and rationality. Yeah, really. That kind of thinking is a throwback to a previous career path, but one that has, of course, always stuck with me. And I am very happy with how the post turned out.

More Sun

We spent seven weeks last summer in Northern France. Man it was an awesome time. None of us wanted to leave! Well, almost true. The thing about Normandy is that the weather is very much like Portland—except that Juneuary lasts through July and August. We were so desperate for sun that we spent a week in Barcelona.

Sqitch: Now with SQLite Support

This week I released Sqitch v0.961. There are a number of great new features v0.95x, including the beginning of two features I’ve had in mind since the beginning: VCS integration and support for multiple databases.

Sqitch on Windows (and Linux, Solaris, and OS X)

Thanks to the hard-working hamsters at the ActiveState PPM Index, Sqitch is available for installation on Windows. According to the Sqitch PPM Build Status, the latest version is now available for installation. All you have to do is:

Sqitch Homebrew Tap

If Sqitch is to succeed, it needs to get into the hands of as many people as possible. That means making it easy to install for people who are not Perl hackers and don’t want to deal with CPAN. The Sqitch Homebrew Tap is my first public stab at that. It provides a series of “Formulas” for Homebrew users to easily download, build, and install Sqitch and all of its dependencies.

Bootstrapping Bucardo Master/Master Replication

Let’s say you have a production database up and running and you want to set up a second database with Bucardo-powered replication between them. Getting a new master up and running without downtime for an existing master, and without losing any data, is a bit fiddly and under-documented. Having just figured out one way to do it with the forthcoming Bucardo 5 code base, I wanted to blog it as much for my own reference as for yours.

Dist::Zilla::LocaleTextDomain for Translators

Here’s a followup on my post about localizing Perl modules with Locale::TextDomain. Dist::Zilla::LocaleTextDomain was great for developers, less so for translators. A Sqitch translator asked how to test the translation file he was working on. My only reply was to compile the whole module, then install it and test it. Ugh.

Sqitch: Trust, But Verify

New today: Sqitch v0.950. There are a few bug fixes, but the most interesting new feature in this release is the verify command, as well as the complementary --verify option to the deploy command. The add command has created test scripts since the beginning; they were renamed verify in v0.940. In v0.950 these scripts are actually made useful.

Sqitch Update: All Your Rebase Are…Never Mind

I’m pleased to announce the release of Sqitch v0.940. The focus of this release? Sanity.

New in PostgreSQL 9.2: format()

There’s a new feature in PostgreSQL 9.2 that I don’t recall seeing blogged about elsewhere: the format() function. From the docs:

Thinking about Changing Sqitch Change IDs

When Sqitch, (the database change management app I’ve been working on for the last several months) parses a deployment plan, it creates a unique ID for each change in the plan. This ID is a SHA1 hash generated from information about the change, which is a string that looks something like this:

Mocking Serialization Failures

I’ve been hacking on the forthcoming Bucardo 5 code base the last couple weeks, as we’re going to start using it pretty extensively at work, and it needed a little love to get it closer to release. The biggest issue I fixed was the handling of serialization failures.

Localize Your Perl modules with Locale::TextDomain and Dist::Zilla

I've just released Dist::Zilla::LocaleTextDomain v0.80 to the CPAN. This module adds support for managing Locale::TextDomain-based localization and internationalization in your CPAN libraries. I wanted to make it as simple as possible for CPAN developers to do localization and to support translators in their projects, and Dist::Zilla seemed like the perfect place to do it, since it has hooks to generate the necessary binary files for distribution.

Sqitch Symbolism

It has been a while since I last blogged about Sqitch. The silence is in part due to the fact that I’ve moved from full-time Sqitch development to actually putting it to use building databases at work. This is exciting, because it needs the real-world experience to grow up.