Older blog entries for purcell (starting at number 27)

Version 0.6 of DBDoc is now out, featuring Oracle support! (For the uninitiated, this means that javadoc-style HTML schema documentation can now be automatically generated from a running Oracle instance.)

(Most of the hard work was done by Andy Todd, to whom I am greatly indebted.)

This release neatly coincides with the change from PostgreSQL to Oracle that has taken place in my day-job this week. The wonders of synchroncity...

Having used Oracle for 2 1/2 years on a previous project I wasn't looking forward to returning to its quirks and complications, but the experience has been quite bearable so far.

Andy Todd contributed a fantastic Oracle implementation of the DBDoc schema API. It's now in CVS and is receiving some last-minute tweaking before a new release is made. Watch this space...

Last night it snowed enthusiastically. Accordingly, I have another recent little poem to offer:

Cold air shrinks my brain
No space left for worries.

A quiet weekend at home; hacked up a Python module that parses Java class files. It was mainly just a fun exercise, but it could be entertaining to implement the Java reflection API in Python; it could then be integrated into non-Java IDEs, for example.

And, completely off-topic, a fun poem I wrote last week

Winter day in Autumn
No-one wearing gloves but
I'm glad I brought mine.

Today the first snow of the winter is falling here in Munich! It's such a joy to watch the seasons change. It seems like only yesterday that it was 35C and everybody was swimming in the lakes; now's it already creamy soup weather, and soon we'll be ice skating!

Is that relevant to the world of software? It is, but making the connection is left as an exercise for the reader.

Wow! dbdoc was pretty well received; 800 page views and 30 downloads yesterday. Someone kindly volunteered to implement the schema API for Oracle (and possibly MySQL too).

And someone else pointed out a couple of shortcomings in my simplistic initial version of the API. To my mind, this is one of the nicest things about the open source community; if one gives away vaguely useful software for free, other people will freely offer their hard-earned wisdom in return.

Time to find out some more about the quirks of various databases...

After a long coding lull, I've just made the fourth release of 'dbdoc', and announced it on the Python list in order to solicit implementations of the schema API for other databases.

Day-job commitments, good weather and social activities (shock, horror!) have kept me too busy to hack on free code in recent times. One highlight this month was meeting illustrious Erlang hacker Luke Gorrie here in Munich at Oktoberfest time. (Another was seeing the post-dotcom-crash industry decimation at the Systems IT show.)

I posted my DB schema documentation generator at dbdoc.sourceforge.net.

It works pretty nicely for me, with Postgres 7. Will anyone volunteer to implement the schema API for another database?

At the weekend I hacked up an initial version of the DB schema documentation generator I mentioned in my last diary entry, for Postgres 7.

It's about 400 lines of code in total, and does a pretty nice job for the schema we're using at work. Auto-documented are: tables, columns (types, lengths, default values, nullability, primary/foreign keyness), and indexes. Stored procs should be easy to add, though we're not using any because they're a Bad Thing For Portability.

I'll tidy up the code and post it somewhere; then I'll be looking for experts to hack up implementations of the schema introspection API for other databases.

Been looking at how to generate javadoc-like information describing a database schema. I came up with a reasonable Python API for schema introspection, and I'm writing a Postgres implementation of it.

The idea is to pair up the schema with metadata that provides column and table descriptions, and to generate HTML output akin to that of Javadoc.

Other than that, not too much interest in hacking lately. Off to Bali in a week's time for some R&R. It's a hard life being a geek.

Minor release of JArgs today, after simplifying the interface somewhat. A few people seem to be using it already.

Also saw some downloads of cvsutils. Now that's one I really use myself.

Apart from that, I'm trying to figure out how to get from here in Munich to the Erlang conference in Stockholm on September 27th, which is right in the middle of the Oktoberfest and its associated travel crises. For those who aren't familiar with that particular Bavarian insanity, just imagine a million drunken soccer fans queueing for beer and/or rollercoasters.