Re: next meeting about DOMAINs, and last night's meeting report

On Jan 31, 2007, at 9:30 AM, Selena Deckelmann wrote:

> Our next meeting on February 20th will be about DOMAINs, led by the
> inimitable David Wheeler. David has not been able to attend our
> last few meetings, but we are looking forward to his return. I
> will post a more detailed description in the next week or so.

And I look forward to writing it. :-P

> Also, I brought up an annoying problem I've had building DBD::mysql
> on OS X 10.4. It was more of a Perl issue - but still! What are
> the MySQL people thinking to not have this working!? DBD::Pg works
> great.

I think that there was a change in the MySQL headers in recent 5.0
releases. I know that we lost a lot of time over this one…

> Then, he dove into the schemas he's developed to handle the
> different data sources and showed how he came up with a set of
> generic sensor data tables. He expected more heckles from the
> crowd on a slide about not using surrogate keys, but we all just
> rolled over - mostly. Perhaps we can arrange for Bill to have a
> debate sometime with someone who has stronger feelings -- he seemed
> to be itching for a fight.

http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/database/soup/archives/primary-keyvil-
part-iii-7365

> Also, as the schema changes, using views to support legacy
> applications is very useful. This brought up the need for rules in
> conjunction with the views for writing data back. There was some
> talk of a package that automates some of the rule creation - I'd be
> interested if someone wanted to post more information about this to
> the list!

My Object::Relation module does this for classes. I hope to get back
to working on it again eventually (especially after wrestling with
ActiveRecord for a few months).

> Bill cut his presentation short - there was more about PostGIS that
> we didn't see at all and he skipped through a few slides toward the
> end. Maybe he will do a shorter talk on PostGIS sometime in the
> future!

That would rock.

Thanks for the summary, Selena.

Best,

David