Andrew Channels Dexter Pinion (Posts about database)

Gerald release 0.4.1

Andrew J Todd esq. — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 11:45:43 GMT

Before starting on some of the big changes planned for version 0.5, and thanks to patches and suggestions from various people I've addressed a couple of issues with Gerald 0.4. This means that we now have release Gerald 0.4.1

What's new in this release? Not much, just some bug fixes, documentation changes and (hopefully) an egg that is installable on all platforms. The .egg files available from PyPI (and soon to be available on SourceForge) should install without any errors and if my testing is correct will be usable on multiple platforms including Windows.

Downloads are available at the PyPI page and the SourceForge project page. As always, please send me an email with any problems or suggestions for improvement.

Gerald release 0.4

Andrew J Todd esq. — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 15:36:17 GMT

I've been revelling in the Python goodness this weekend at PyCon Australia. This has motivated me to fix the last couple of issues and then package and release Gerald 0.4

What's new in this release? The most important changes are fixes to a number of issues identified by users of SQLPython. Gerald was appearing to take a long time to collect large schemas but was actually failing silently. I added test cases to show the problem and then fixed the code. This shouldn't happen any more.

I applied a couple of patches supplied by Catherine Devlin to cope with columns without defined lengths and to not get DBA objects in Oracle schemas.

I slipped in some new features as well; I implemented the to_xml and compare methods on the CodeObject class, and Gerald now supports views in MySQL (as long as you are running 5.1 or above).

Finally, I changed the project documentation to use Sphinx.

Downloads are available at the PyPI page and the SourceForge project page.

If you find any problems or want to contribute any code just send me an email.

Gerald release 0.3.6

Andrew J Todd esq. — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 14:06:28 GMT

I have just released version 0.3.6 of Gerald. Gerald is a general purpose database schema toolkit written in Python.

This release was at the request of the sqlpython project and contains only one change. A new convenience method connect has been added to the Schema class. This enables a schema to be initiated and then later have a database connection associated with it. Because this changes the public API of gerald I've released this under a new version number.

Development, bug and issue tracking and the project wiki are available on the project Trac site. Source code and distribution files are available at the sourceforge page.

The next release will be 0.4. Exactly what will make up that release is still evolving, although it is likely to feature SQL Server support as I have just started a new job and all of the systems there use it. To see what else is in the release and to track progress take a look at the version 0.4 roadmap.

Gerald release 0.3.5

Andrew J Todd esq. — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:40:34 GMT

This last weekend I released version 0.3.5 of gerald.

The major component of this release was to add a 'User' class to the oracle_schema module. This is similar to the 'Schema' class but whilst that shows all of the objects a database user owns the 'User' class contains details of all of the objects they can access, including those owned by other database users. This was requested by the sqlpython project to enable them to use gerald for database introspection.

The only other change was to ensure that the NotImplementedError exception is raised in all of the super type methods that are just stubs. This is mainly in the Schema.py module and thus meant that I had to add a set of tests for this module.

Development, bug and issue tracking and the project wiki are available on the project Trac site. Source code and distribution files are available at the sourceforge page.

The next release will be 0.4. Exactly what will make up that release is still evolving. To see what is in the release and to track progress take a look at the version 0.4 roadmap.

Gerald release 0.3.1

Andrew J Todd esq. — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:25:27 GMT

Everyone, say hello to version 0.3.1 of gerald. This is a minor update that fixed some issues introduced in release 0.3 In summary these are:

Ticket 17 - Views have been converted to dictionaries from tuples
Ticket 18 - Reading an Oracle sequence updates it's current value
Ticket 19 - Postgres primary keys were not represented properly when read from the database

Development, bug and issue tracking and the project wiki are available on the project Trac site. Source code and distribution files are available at the sourceforge page.

The next release will be 0.3.5 and will introduce the concept of a 'User'. This is similar to a 'Schema' but will reference all of the objects a database user can see even if they don't own them. You can track progress for the release using the version 0.3.5 roadmap.

Gerald release 0.2.6

Andrew J Todd esq. — Mon, 04 May 2009 12:38:43 GMT

I have packaged and released version 0.2.6 of gerald. This is an update that doesn't change any functionality but has involved a major re-factoring of the module unit tests. Rather than wait I have released the package in it's current form to give a base for some major changes coming in release 0.3 Gerald is being considered for use in the SQLPython toolkit. For them to get full value I will need to make a number of changes to the code. Luckily for all of us these were on the development roadmap anyway, so I've just moved them up the priority list. As other people have shown an interest in the tool I have also invested in a little infrastructure and have fired up Trac for the sourceforge project. Gerald now has a wiki and, more importantly, a ticketing system for bug reports and feature requests. I've put the changes coming for release 0.3 in a number of tickets and you can track progress for the release using the version 0.3 roadmap.

Gerald release 0.2.5

Andrew J Todd esq. — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 15:06:33 GMT

I have packaged and released version 0.2.5 of gerald. This is another minor release with a couple of bugs fixes and one important administration update. You can find all of the details in the CHANGELOG.txt file that comes with the source distribution (or view it here) but in a nutshell the changes from the last release are;

Fixed a bug in some connections to PostgreSQL
Removed references to database links without passwords in Oracle
Converted the package to use setuptools and from this release onward it is installable using easy_install

The last change was at the request of the SQLPython project, if you haven't taken a look at that wonderful utility yet, please do. To support them it is likely that the next release of Gerald will support SQLite. Please download, install and enjoy. Bug reports. tumultuous praise or cash bribes to the usual address please.

Web 2.0 - better late than never

Andrew J Todd esq. — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 08:53:55 GMT

Just to prove that I am doing things even when I'm not posting here I am leaving my mark on the internet at these other places as well;

My tumblog - is that even what they are called?
Twitter - of course
Plurk - although these messages may be suspiciously similar to my tweets
Facebook - just to keep up with the juvenile party photos of people I went to university with
Flickr - although most of the photos are restricted, if you want to see them drop me an email.

And you never know, I may actually post something technical here in the near future.

Gerald release 0.2.4

Andrew J Todd esq. — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 15:17:05 GMT

I have packaged and released version 0.2.4 of gerald. This is a minor release with a couple of little features and some documentation and admin updates. You can find all of the details in the CHANGELOG.txt file that comes with the source distribution (or view it here) but in a nutshell the changes from the last release are;

Added support for comments on columns in Oracle
Added support for comments on tables in Oracle
Changed the stylesheet used for documentation
Added more information to the README file and converted it to reStructured Text format

Please download, install and enjoy. Bug reports or tumultuous praise to the usual address please.

Oracle Parameter Files

Andrew J Todd esq. — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 15:07:33 GMT

This isn't going to be news to any Oracle DBAs reading this. So if you are one, can I suggest you move along quickly to the next item in your feed reader.

Anyone left is hopefully curious like I was to figure out the difference between 'traditional' oracle initialisation files (init.ora) and the new fangled server parameter files (sp files). Well wonder no further fair reader for I can explain all.

Prior to Oracle 9.2 (a long time ago in Oracle database years) it was only possible to permanently effect the configuration parameters of your database by changing the init.ora file and restarting your database instance. You could make changes whilst the database was running by using the 'ALTER SYSTEM SET' command but these would be lost the next time your database was restarted because the startup process would use the values in your init.ora file. This meant that any instance tuning would require some informed 'twiddling' by the DBA to settle on a suitable value for an instance parameter and that would then be followed by a restart, causing anyone using the database to be mightily inconvenienced.

With the introduction of server parameter files in 9.2 and above changes made interactively (using 'ALTER SYSTEM SET') are automatically persisted. This is because whenever a change is made this way it is automagically written to your spfile.

This article has a much more comprehensive description of the differences between the two different types of files. One of the useful things it mentions is the resolution order the database server uses to select an initialisation file on startup. This is;

spfile<SID>.ora
spfile.ora
init<SID>.ora

Tick another thing off the list of 'stuff that has been bothering me and I need to figure out'.