I released Sqitch v0.996 today. Despite the minor version increase, this is a pretty big release. I’m busy knocking out all the stuff I want to get done for 1.0, but the version space is running out, so just a minor version jump from v0.995 to v0.996. But a lot changed. A couple the biggies:

Goodbye Mouse and Moose, Hello Moo

If you’re not a Perl programmer, you probably aren’t familiar with Moose or its derivatives Mouse and Moo. Briefly, it’s an object system. Great interface and features, but freaking huge—and slow. Mouse is a lighter version, and when we (mostly) switched to it last year, it yielded a 20-30% speed improvement.

Still wasn’t great, though. So on a day off recently, I switched to Moo, which implements most of Moose but without a lot of the baggage. At first, there wasn’t much difference in performance, but as I profiled it (Devel::NYTProf is indispensable for profiling Perl apps, BTW), I was able to root out all trace of Moose or Mouse, including in CPAN modules Sqitch depends on. The result is around a 40% speedup over what we had before. Honestly, it feels like a new app, it’s so fast. I’m really happy with how it turned out, and to have shed some of the baggage from the code base.

The downside is that package maintainers will need to do some work to get the new dependencies built. Have a look at the RPM spec changes I made to get our internal Sqitch RPMs to build v0.996.

MySQL Password Handling

The handling of MySQL passwords has also been improved. Sqitch now uses the $MYSQL_PWD environment variable if a password is provided in a target. This should simplify authentication when running MySQL change scripts through the mysql client client.

Furthermore, if MySQL::Config is installed, Sqitch will look for passwords in the client and mysql sections of your MySQL configuration files (~/.my.cnf, /etc/my.cnf). This should already happen automatically when executing scripts, but Sqitch now tries to replicate that behavior when connecting to the database via DBI.

Spotting the $MYSQL_PWD commit, Ștefan Suciu updated the Firebird engine to use the $ISC_PASSWORD when running scripts. Awesome.

Vertically Integrated

And finally, another big change: I added support for Vertica, a very nice commercial column-store database that features partitioning and sharding, among other OLAP-style functionality. It was originally forked from PostgreSQL, so it was fairly straight-forward to port, though I did have to borrow a bit from the Oracle and SQLite engines, too. This port was essential for work, as we’re starting to use Vertical more and more, and need ways to manage changes.

If you’re using Vertica, peruse the tutorial to get a feel for what it’s all about. If you want to install it, you can get it from CPAN:

cpan install App::Sqitch BDD::ODBC

Or, if you’re on Homebrew:

brew tap theory/sqitch
brew install sqitch_vertica

Be warned that there’s a minor bug in v0.996, though. Apply this diff to fix it:

 @@ -16,7 +16,7 @@ our $VERSION = '0.996';
 
 sub key    { 'vertica' }
 sub name   { 'Vertica' }
-sub driver { 'DBD::Pg 2.0' }
+sub driver { 'DBD::ODBC 1.43' }
 sub default_client { 'vsql' }
 
 has '+destination' => (

That fix will be in the next release, of course, as will support for Vertica 6.

What Next?

I need to focus on some other work stuff for a few weeks, but then I expect to come back to Sqitch again. I’d like to get 1.0 shipped before the end of the year. To that end, next up I will be rationalizing configuration hierarchies to make engine selection and deploy-time configuration more sensible. I hope to get that done by early October.