Random Thoughts from Castaway

Fairies and Aspect, an update

written by Castaway

I've been playing quite a bit of Might and Magic VII lately, the brain just didn't want to code, and its waaaaay too hot here..

But I did get some "work" done, mostly inspired by the people on #dbix-class who want to do funky deployment things with
SQL::Translator. I added a patch from omega to conditionally use quotes around table names in the PostgreSQL producer, as quoted ones are a pain in Pg. Hanging out on #dbix-class and helping people is a decent way to get known and get ideas..

So deploy in DBIx::Class takes the all in one output of an SQL::Translator producer, and proceeds to split it naively on ";\n" to get the individual statements. This makes a bit of a mess when the output contains comments, as the don't end in semi-colons.. and the next thing it does
is throw away lines beginning with "--" (an SQL comment). So when you have:

-- this is a drop statement
DROP TABLE mytable;

.. You get the idea. Anyway, SQL::Translator creates the output in the
first place by creating the individual statements, and gluing them
together with a join. So why not make it return the list of statements
in list context? So I did, and it's working for DB2, MySQL, and PostgreSQL so far. I also split the huge "produce" subroutine into
parts that create tables, fields, constraints and so on, for when you
only want bits.. And while I was at it, I added some "alter_" subs, which can now hopefully be used by SQL::Translator::Diff, which will be fun to fix..

None of this happened alone though, thanks to the folks on #dbix-class who tested, and prodded etc.

As for Aspect, after seeing a talk on it at Milton Keynes Perlmongers by Tom Hukins I eventually decided to use it yesterday at work, and it's great fun! Basically trying to figure out what data a system
uses, without actually altering it's code.