[Originally posted to livejournal]

I just finished the first phase of the latest db migration. Yep, I overhauled my schema yet again!

Was it really necessary? Strictly speaking, no. :) But the new design is going to allow for some sweet hacks that wouldn't have been possible otherwise -- stuff I've been contemplating for a while, but the hurdles never quite seemed worth it before. But I figure since I'm doing some major reworking anyway, and the damn thing has been down for months already, now is as good a time as ever to do some of this stuff.

Last night, I spent several hours debating with myself, contemplating, and hammering out the new schema; I wanted every detail to be right, regardless of the short term migration effort required. And while I was at it, I got into dabbling with PL/SQL for the first time to do stuff I would have always manually done with perl before. Not exactly a pretty language, but for relatively simple operations, it makes things very convenient.

So for the past couple hours, I've been debugging my migration script and watching the bulk of everything I've written during the past 5+ years scroll by in the form of postgres queries.

Now I just need to get post-9/2004 stuff imported (could be a bit of a hassle), get a bunch more code written, go through my own little non-QA process, and I'll be ready to unveil my latest insanity upon the world. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Ok, now I don't want to build it up too much. What I'm doing is not revolutionary, in any sense of the word. After long contemplation, I finally decided against the use of Mason, mainly for portability reasons. Maybe I'll visit it again next time around, if I'm running the site on my own server. To use it right not only requires mod_perl (for the best performance), but also pretty much free reign to tweak apache's conf in all sorts of interesting ways. So... Maybe another time.

So I'm doing it in good old fashioned cgi perl, reusing much of my old code, and throwing away many of the parts that feature antiquity piled upon antiquity. Plus I'm developing several new modules, which combine many of the ideas I've been experimenting with in isolated pieces over the past several months into an overall scheme of things!

Anyway, I'm excited that it's all starting to take shape. A little.

There will be a lot more to write when the new site is online. LJ has its uses, but I am a creature that feels most comfortable in its own habitat. Silly? Perhaps, but that's how things are.

I need to sleep. Will be meeting someone in the morning. My somatic schedue is crazy. Peace out.