php

Over the Holidays I spent some time pushing forward with recovering my old blog posts and getting them loaded into the new blog. While the posts are now visible, not everything is 100%, so I thought a quick run-down of what works and what doesn't might be appropriate.

1. 90%+ of blog posts have been re-imported; I believe I have copies of the missing ones, but they didn't play nicely with the importer script. I'll probably get them up some day, but if you find you're looking for a specific one that doesn't show up, drop me a line and I'll re-import it by hand
.

2. Categories have been re-built for imported entries, so those following category specific feeds, you should see the related entries. I'm not sure it's 100%, but this is somewhat non-critical, so probably will be left as is. If you find something really wrong or think something is worth updating, just let me know.


3. Speaking of search, none of the entries show up in search results right now. I believe I need to store the text bodies in multiple places for the search code to work against it, but I haven't looked to closely at that. It is something I plan to fix though (actually I think all of search is broken now... woopsie)


4. Each entries unique identifier should have been preserved, which means that you should be able to map old entries to new ones with a little url hacking. For example, if you are looking for the old entry
   

   http://people.planetpostgresql.org/xzilla/index.php?/archives/149-out-parameter-sql-plpgsql-examples.html

   you can find it on the new blog by going to

   http://www.xzilla.net/index.php?/archives/149-out-parameter-sql-plpgsql-examples.html

   (This could probably be turned into a nice apache re-write rule, but that's up to the planetpostgresql.org maintainer, not me)


5. links and styles don't work in old blog posts; the links are there, but they got converted into some kind of wiki formatting during conversion. I probably won't go back and fix this, but again if you really need a specific post cleaned up, let me know. (Or if someone can come up with some generic sql replacement fu I can run, I'd be inclined to try it


6. Comments are all missing, but I think I have them all, and with the id preservation, this should be something that is recoverable, I just haven't gotten to it yet.

Big thanks go to Magnus for the initial re-import script (even if it was in python). While I hacked it to do recovery in a different way, he worked out most of the hard parts which made things actually possible for me (although I am now much more familiar with python regular expressions than I ever imagined I'd be)

OK, I don't expect every Open Source community to be able to avoid overlapping conferences, but I sure wish these two could avoid it. Once again it looks like php|tek and PGCon will be butting heads, as both will be held the last full week of May, 2009. It's been awhile since I've made it out to a PHP event, and php|tek was one of my top choices, but alas, I can't pass on PGCon.

This is also a problem for me as someone who works with the PGCon scheduling committee. We get a fair share of Perl related talks and a nice smattering of other languages as well, but we've had a heck of a time getting more PHP related content to fill out the schedule; this doesn't make that task any easier. It's a shame too, because PHP and Postgres is a nice combination; PHP is used by the PostgreSQL project itself to power much of it's web architecture, and it's also used by companies to power some of the most popular websites on the internet (yes, even bigger than Wikipedia).

I guess I can hold out hope that the travel policies of the U.S. will inspire some people to forgo the trip to Chicago and veer toward Ottawa instead? sigh Here's hoping for better luck in 2010.

Soon after they announced, I'd been hoping to take [http://www.google.com/chrome Google Chrome] for a test drive. The [http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html comic book] laid out a lot of interesting things, my favorite being the discussion of separate processes leading to detachable (and "retachable") browser tabs, something I have been touting for **years** as a long term [http://galeon.sourceforge.net/ Galeon] user. My big problem though? I run Linux, and Google has so far left Linux support on the back burner. Still, I figured that someone had probably made a Linux build available by now, so inspired by John McCain's speech on TV tonight, I set about seeing if I could get it set up.



Basically the process now for running Chrome on Linux revolves around getting some advanced [http://www.winehq.org/ Wine] machinery in place (links to follow), and then everything else works like a normal Wine install. One sticking point I ran into is that my Wine was configured as a win2k server, and Google requires WinXP or newer, so I had to reconfigure that before it would install. This was pretty tricky to figure out as there was absolutely zero error messages when trying to install, instead I just got a empty return to prompt. If you're giving it a try, make sure you're configured similarly.



Anyway, after getting it up an running, I ran through a quick checklist of sites I wanted to test; [http://news.google.com/ Google news], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_model Wikipedia], [http://www.slideshare.net/ Slideshare], [http://www.omniti.com/ OmniTI's] website, and several planets all worked fine. I then did some testing of [http://phppgadmin.sourceforge.net/?page=demo phpPgAdmin], and it seemed to work fine. This was a concern I had, given a lack of Apple products on the dev team, we already have enough issues supporting Safari (donations welcome [[image /xzilla/templates/default/img/emoticons/tongue.png alt=":-P" style="display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;" class="emoticon" /]]), and now PHP developers (really all web developers) now have yet another browser they can expect bug reports from. Yippee! But again, it worked well, and we have some fairly complicated javascript going on with the tree menu, so that seems good.



All in all I am happy with the experiment. I don't suspect I will really use it with any regularity, but it is interesting to play with (and who knows, maybe upgrading wine will make [http://www.phunland.com/wiki/Home phun] run better). If you'd like to get it running on your Linux, I've put a screenshot and the help links I used after the jump; they're mostly Ubuntu specific, but should be easily ported to other flavors.






[[image http://people.planetpostgresql.org/xzilla/uploads/chrome-screenshot.png alt="Chrome on Ubuntu"]]



primary link I used was

[http://www.myscienceisbetter.info/2008/09/install-google-chrome-on-linux-using-wine.html http://www.myscienceisbetter.info/2008/09/install-google-chrome-on-linux-using-wine.html]



the other links I looked at while going through the above were:

[http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb]

[http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks]

[http://www.nabble.com/winetricks-help-td18006498.html http://www.nabble.com/winetricks-help-td18006498.html]

[http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=908493&page=7 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=908493&page=7]

The other night I was having dinner with a bunch of folks, and I think it was [http://www.jacobian.org/ Jacob Kaplan-Moss] (Django dude and Postgres user) who noted that the Postgres community's governance model was this crazy mix of distributed peer-to-peer style chaos, that on it's surface wouldn't seem functional, but somehow seems to work really well for our project (my paraphrazation). It's hard to argue. We don't have a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds one true leader], and we don't have a [http://www.mysql.com corporate master]. In fact, we're so multi-faceted, we actually have two names (minimum) for the project! At times, this is a really good thing. Listening to Mark Shuttleworth's keynote last night, and his pointing out that an important part of the future of open source is having choice not just at the software level, but as users, developers, and in economic circles as well; and you're happy to note Postgres is already very much there. Of course, I promised Momjian (the elder) I'd have some angst in this post, so let me ignore the benefits of this model and focus on something a little more negative.


Yesterday EnterpriseDB announced their new [http://www.enterprisedb.com/tservices/certification/overview.do Postgres Plus training program]. It looks like a pretty comprehensive set of options, with tracks focusing on development and administration, with multiple levels of mastery involved, and different training programs to go along with them. With one of the big issues of Postgres adoption being finding qualified folks to administer it, a training program built around certifications is certainly something that the Postgres community has had it's mind on for some time. And therein lies [http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-the3.htm the rub]. Several members of the Postgres community have already started work on an [http://www.postgresqlcertification.org/ open community certification] standard. The idea was to allow for an open development process for determining what types of things should be tested and to allow anyone access to the information for setting up training courses; a true community effort, that could have multiple vendors involved, giving end users a variety of ways to get trained and get certified. This wasn't just some crazy idea someone cooked up either; it was based on the [http://www.bsdcertification.org/ BSD community's] recent efforts down the same path, and several people from that effort are also helping out with the Postgres community certification group. In case you were wondering, the EnterpriseDB program has had no involvement with the community work that has been done. D'oh.



EnterpriseDB is an interesting company, they've done a lot for Postgres, and I'm glad to have them involved with the community. But I know that they are not a company that has open source / free software built into the core of their company values, and it iss not surprising to me that they would go off and develop something like this with no community involvement. Maybe I don't even blame them; on the flip side of this we have members of our community who are pretty adamant about allowing commercial entities to have control over any part of the Postgres ecosystem, which certainly can cause issues for companies trying to get involved. I pointed this out to Mark Shuttleworth last night when we were discussing adoption of [https://launchpad.net/ Launchpad] and the [https://launchpad.net/bzr bazaar] toolset's adoption within the PostgreSQL community; Canonical's holding back of certain pieces to their system had caused many people to shy away from it. Side note; this is one thing I like about [http://www.omniti.com/ OmniTI's] culture; we are heavily committed to open source, have released a bunch of [http://labs.omniti.com/ our own code] and contributed back to a lot of projects, but if you want to run your company on Oracle, we'll support that. We have found a balance between the two aforementioned extremes.



What gives me rub++ on this topic is that, within the last six months to a year, I have spoken with a number of people within the community who have asked me about this topic, and I've maintained a pretty consistent theme on the direction I thought the community should take. It seemed to me what we needed was to have several of the leading companies involved with training and consulting, including a few key community leaders who are recognized for thier work with Postgres educations (conferences, talks, articles, books), and let this body of people set forth on the task. The key idea was to make sure we have enough community involvement that the general population could accept this as a community solution (ie. No single vendor in control of the operation), but let some of the commercial companies who have a vested interest in this use their resources to help this happen more quickly, rather than letting things get bottlenecked as it was done in the spare time of a group of volunteers (who, to be honest, are already spread a little thin from helping out in other areas). This wasn't my idea, this was what I had observed having happened within the PHP community, where a couple of key companies ([http://www.zend.com/en/services/certification/ Zend], the [http://zceguide.com/ PHP|Architect] folks), got together with several recognized community members ([http://shiflett.org/blog/2004/jul/zend-php-certification Shifflet], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_America:_World_Police Ramsey], etc...) to produce the PHP certification program. By all accounts, this has worked very well for those people involved. The training program was created in a reasonable amount of time, and there were many viewpoints involved that kept it pretty well rounded. Glad we didn't try that...



So now what is to become of Postgres certification? I think most people in the PHP community are pretty happy with the arrangement they have come to. To be fair, I'm guessing most people in the BSD community are happy to have their community certification system, and I'd bet most Oracle folks are pretty happy with their [http://education.oracle.com/pls/web_prod-plq-dad/db_pages.getpage?page_id=39&p_org_id=1001 single vendor option] they have available to them. Given that Postgres land now has two options, I suspect that there are some people in the community happy with the community effort (though it is probably a year or maybe even two from actually producing something), and some who won't have any qualms with going to "[http://www.enterprisedb.com the vendor]" to get their branded certification, but I suspect there are some people in the middle who are not excited (and likely confused) about the current situation of these two camps. It's possible people will flock to EDB's system and the community effort will be made irrelevant, but it seems just as likely that there could be some community push back, and people will avoid the EDB offerings making EDB take a hit for thier efforts (Disclaimer: I'm an [http://www.vue.com/sra/ SRA certified] PostgreSQL Administrator [[image /xzilla/templates/default/img/emoticons/smile.png alt=":-)" style="display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;" class="emoticon" /]] ). Both of those outcomes seem to involve somebody coming up with the short end of the stick, and that seems unfortunate. The good thing about EDB announcing this while at OSCon is that several people involved in both efforts will be in town this week, so there might end up being some actual discussion on the topic and maybe even some ideas on how to resolve it. Until then, we walk down another "interesting" evolution in the multi-faceted organization that is the PostgreSQL community.

A couple months ago we started talking seriously about replacing CVS with a more advanced system for [http://phppgadmin.sourceforge.net/ phpPgAdmin]. We looked around a little, but ended up going with [http://git.or.cz/ Git]. We didn't have any favorites going in, though we knew [http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2008-June/001190.html moving to subversion] was a waste of time, and in the end Git was probably chosen mostly because, of the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_revision_control distributed revision control systems] out there, Git is what other projects in our [http://git.postgresql.org/ sphere of influence] seem to be gravitating toward.



When you read up on Git, it has a lot of awesome bells and whistles, expecially for CVS based projects. A CVS import tool, support for multiple tags/branches, setup for shared commit repositories (to match the CVS workflow), and even CVS compatible syntax and command line interface. This made Git seem like a slam dunk. Unfortunately, if you're using 3rd party project hosting services, you quickly find no one wants to set all that up for you. We use Sourceforge now, and they probably should be setting that up since they have all of the pieces already in place, but AFAIK Git isn't on the radar for them. In the end I gave up on that dream; if you're going to use git, just use Git and live with it.



There are a couple of Git providers out there, we ended up going with [http://www.github.com Github]. Github, like Git itself, looks awesome up front, but has some issues going in. It's based around the RoR community, which means that using it service involves navigating unreliability and lack of documentation (since everyone should "just know" how things work), but also means you get very nice tools and a subtle influx of happiness into your development environment (adding more happiness should not be overlooked for a project where most people hack on the code in thier spare time). I should note Github offers both free and commercial accounts; right now were using just the free accounts and that's going well for us. I think some people are turned off by thier commercial side, but I think the ASP business model they have is much better than SourceForge's open source website and closed source commercial product model, so I've no bones about it.



We haven't done a release yet, though we have one on the radar, so we'll be vetting our release process against Git soon. We also haven't moved our website and project repos into Git yet either, those aren't critical for development, so we haven't felt a pressing need, but eventually that should happen too. I'd be interesting in hearing about other popular PHP projects that have moved to Git (or any DRCS system really), and if people want, I'd be happy to give more details on what we went through so far in the conversion process; I'll be at [http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/content/home OSCon] next week, so you can track me down there if you're going, or drop me an email (who knows it may even inspire additional blog posts).



It's still new and shiny (and confusing), but the more I use it, the more I like it. You can't ask for more than that.

So EnterpriseDB had a number of announcements today; a [http://www.enterprisedb.com/about/news_events/press_releases/03_25_08b.do re-alignment of their product line], the [http://www.enterprisedb.com/about/news_events/press_releases/03_25_08c.do open sourcing of their recently purchased GridSQL product], and the securing of [http://www.enterprisedb.com/about/news_events/press_releases/03_25_08a.do a new round of funding which included among the investors none other than IBM]. Depending on where you stand, these may not seem that exciting, but I think all of them should have some impact in their respective areas, though of course the juicy one is that IBM investment.


With regards to their re-alignment of their product line, well, I don't think this is terribly exciting for me personally, but I suspect it will help them simplify their development efforts (which I've always thought was a critical component for keeping their business going; drifting one's closed source code from the open source project's code has been the death of [http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_derived_databases previous efforts]), and will probably make it easier for customers to move between their open source bundle and their proprietary product. What's probably more important, though really overlooked, is the various "quickstart" guides that are supposed to be bundled into the product, which help developers get started with various technologies ranging from JDBC to Drupal. This is something that Microsoft has done for [http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/271/php-applications-on-iis/ IIS and PHP], and something I've really wanted to work on for PostgreSQL, but haven't had time for.



As to the open sourcing of GridSQL; again for me this is not significant. I do have to give them a nod for continuing their commitment to open source in general, though I would have like to see this come under a BSD license, rather than their exception driven GPL scheme. It will be interesting to see if they can build a community around it; it is generally extremely difficult to build a community around [http://people.planetpostgresql.org/greg/index.php?/archives/120-Postgres-is-not-for-sale.html open source products]. I think they might have more luck in getting parts of GridSQL pushed out into existing projects, but that will be easier to discern now that the code is out there, for me at least, the code and the features just sound too magical.



But of course this leaves me to think about the IBM investment into EnterpriseDB. The thing that sticks out the most is the question of Why? Why would IBM invest into EntperiseDB, when they have (at least) 3 other database products that they own themselves (DB2, Informix, and the [http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/22921.wss recently purchased SolidDB]), not to mention their existing agreement with [http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/21430.wss MySQL] (err.. Sun). Maybe this is just a reflection of IBM's movement from a product company toward a services company, and they see the expansion of EnterpriseDB and Postgres as growing a market that will someday serve as future customers (actually DB2 and Postgres are pretty similar). Or maybe what is really going on is that IBM is fed up with hearing how they just can't measure up to Oracle. I mean the recent [http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206901483 survey stating that Oracle ranked #1] across the board just had to get their goat, and EntepriseDB probably looks like a good solution; a product that they feel doesn't have a chance to displace any of the major players, but something that can cut a small percentage directly out of the Oracle customer base might be enough to help get DB2 into the #1 spot. For EntepriseDB, if they can work the aforementioned small percentage into say, 10%, they have a pretty viable business. So, is that it? Maybe they can't build a bigger [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_%28yacht%29 yacht], but they can help spawn a dozen new ways to help take down their biggest rival.

The phpPgAdmin team has released a 4.2-Beta-1 package for your immediate use

and testing. Along with a whole slew of new features, the 4.2 release will also introduce support for PostgreSQL 8.3. You can download it from our website at [http://phppgadmin.sourceforge.net http://phppgadmin.sourceforge.net]. The beta also serves as our call for translation updates; translators are encouraged to send in updates, and any

bug reports should be logged in our project tracker at [http://sourceforge.net/projects/phppgadmin/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/phppgadmin/]. Thanks for your support!