Latest

2024-12-08

For the past few months, I've been working on DBA, a utility to make it easier for me to copy databases from one machine to another. (The official documentation page is here, but there isn't much there yet.) I got tired of having to work out the correct commands every time (and invariably spending a lot of time getting them wrong), as well as typing a command and then not seeing any sign of progress.

DBA is part of a larger project, The Futilities, which is my attempt to make CLI utilities more me-compatible by providing helpful prompts and feedback that explain what is happening, what your choices are, what additional information you need to provide, etc. I'm currently rewriting these to use WUIDL, which makes it easier to define the UI and create help documentation at the same time.

I finally got the download process working several days ago, and I've been tweaking the output for readability and attempting to verify that the data is intact.

This involved setting up a db server on my laptop, which is something I've certainly done before -- but again, the necessary steps can take a good deal of research and time, so I thought DBA should include some automation for that. I got some pieces written, but testing them is difficult since it requires resetting the db engine to a freshly-installed state... and during the process of figuring out the commands, I got the server set up, and decided to cut my losses and leave further testing for later. I did, however, polish up some functions that will quickly check the status of any given db server, saving me the research and work involved in those steps.

The next step is to write the upload functionality; I started on that last night.