New Version of the Rails MySQL Bigint Plugin Released 1

Posted by Steven Hammond Fri, 14 Sep 2007 00:38:00 GMT

There seems to have been a lot of interest in my plugin for enabling MySQL bigints in Rails migrations.

I got a few questions and two patches from Tomasz Wegrzanowski of Trampoline Systems. I’ve reviewed and incorporated these patches in this release. Many thanks for submitting the patches.

The changes in this release are as follows.

  1. bigint primary keys are now signed. This complies with the rails standards and allows the next item to work. See below for suggested next steps on this.
  2. bigint foreign keys now work. The signed/unsigned incompatibility fixed above was causing problems.
  3. The plugin is now transparent to other databases. It has been tested with Oracle and Postgres. I’m interested in hearing if there are issues with the other databases.

I believe that there are other plugins that enable unsigned integer support. If somebody wants to make this plugin compatible with one of those plugins, I’ll gladly incorporate the changes.

Feedback is always welcome below, Steve

New Version of mysql_bigint Rails Plugin

Posted by Steven Hammond Sun, 29 Oct 2006 14:59:00 GMT

I received some feedback that edge Rails broke some things in the mysql_bigint plugin. I've checked in a new version that works correctly with edge rails. Thanks to Jamie Orchard-Hayes for a patch that fixed a few of these issues!

As always, just contact with additional issues.

Now, I've just got to make some time to repackage all of this for resubmission to the core team as I promised back in August...

Steve

DSLs As Rails Plugins 1

Posted by Steven Hammond Sun, 25 Jun 2006 13:07:00 GMT

Thanks to everybody who attended my talk on DSL's yesterday at RailsConf. I had a lot of positive feedback and I thoroughly enjoyed giving it. A couple of great points came up in the Q&A session, that I will be addressing here over the next few of days.

  1. Determining when you need a full fledged DSL vs. a library of classes and methods. In particular one person pointed out that deck.shuffle in my example was probably fine.

  2. Is there (or should there be) a distinction between XML, or other mark-up, based DSLs and executable DSLs like the ones I was discussing.

I've posted the slides for my talk here. If you have feedback, positive or negative, on the talk or ideas on the above questions, please comment below!

Steve