Jauder Ho - links and things

In light of the MySQL conference, I decided to get try to get drizzle up and running on Ubuntu 8.04. I typically try to avoid installing dependencies from source as much as possible and a little bit of Googling turned up some available libraries.

The Drizzle wiki was useful in getting started but did not include all of the available packages.

First, the basic dependencies:

sudo apt-get install libpcre3-dev libevent-dev autoconf \ 
automake bison libtool ncurses-dev libreadline-dev libz-dev g++ \
libssl-dev uuid-dev libpam0g libpam0g-dev gperf

Next, the libevent on 8.04 is too old so a newer version needs to be installed.

sudo apt-get install libevent-dev

Google’s Protocol Buffers as well as libdrizzle need to be installed and the packages are available on the drizzle-developers PPA on Launchpad.

sudo apt-get install libdrizzle-dev libprotobuf-dev \
protobuf-compiler

Finally, download the drizzle sources and compile:

bzr branch lp:drizzle
cd drizzle
./config/autorun.sh
./configure
make
make install

Install and have fun!

Out the box, Rails sends utf8 content. However, the transport and database (in this case MySQL) most likely is *not* configured for utf8.

UTF8 being the fun beast that it is really needs to be used across the board from input to retrieval to prevent any nasty surprises. Besides, it’s good practice should you want to internationalize later.

The following outlines how to convert your Rails app to use utf8.

• Shutdown Rails
• Modify config/database.yml to add encoding: utf8 to each db instance
• Export database to dump file
• Convert the CHARSET from latin1 to utf8 in dump file
• Change MySQL configs and restart DB
• DROP and recreate DB
• Import DB via dump
• Start Rails

For each database,

1.  mysqldump —user=username —password=password —default-character-set=latin1 —skip-set-charset dbname > dump.sql

2. sed -e ‘s/CHARSET=latin1/CHARSET=utf8/g’ dump.sql

3. AT THIS POINT STOP MYSQL, ADD THE OPTIONS BELOW AND THEN START MYSQL
4. mysql —user=username —password=password —execute=”DROP DATABASE dbname; CREATE DATABASE dbname CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;”
5. mysql —user=username —password=password —default-character-set=utf8 dbname
6. RESTART RAILS after making mods to database.yml.

[mysqld]

# Set default charset

init-connect=’SET NAMES utf8’

init_connect=’SET collation_connection = utf8_general_ci’

default-character-set=utf8 

default-collation=utf8_general_ci

[clients]

default-character-set=utf8

[mysql]

default-character-set=utf8 

Rails

Put encoding: utf8 in database.yml

Nginx

charset utf-8

Some additional links:

• http://www.botvector.net/2007/11/encoding-problems.html
• http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowToUseUnicodeStrings
• http://textsnippets.com/posts/show/84