February 20, 2002

Foreign keys, make me feel fine...

The subject is supposed to go along with the song line "Summer Breeze, makes me feel fine...". I didn't know who sung it so off to google we go. Type in summer breeze lyrics and the first hit is for a band called "Type O Negative". Hm, well, that name seems a little... newer than I expected, but people were doing what they felt back then. Follow the link.... well, the lyrics look ok ("Blowin' through the jasmine in my mind") but what's the previous song: "Kill All the White People"?! That doesn't sound too hippie-chic to me! (Of course, they didn't sing the original song, these folks did.)

Anyway, my original point is that I was farting around with foreign key discovery using JDBC today. In my day job I've written a series of Perl classes that takes metadata pulled from a database (currently MS SQL Server) by a fairly small Java program, along with metadata (logical relationship info) created by a fairly small human, and generates lots of Java classes and J2EE deployment descriptors from it. It works pretty well -- flexible development, etc. -- but I hate having to manually enter relationship info.

This sets off a "wouldn't it be cool..." train: if I could just get this stuff from the database. Hey, maybe DBI has this stuff now and I can use it for SPOPS? (Fire up the CPAN shell, install, perldoc) Hey, it's in there! So at some point in the future, you'll be able to point a SPOPS config at one or more tables and have all the relationships just be there. Hm, before I promise anything maybe I should finish the other 238 items on my todo list...

(Originally posted elsewhere)

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