Blosxonomy 0.7 will be up momentarily at Blosxonomy.com - I just finished upgrading timfanelli dot com to make use of it's new database support. Blosxonomy now has the option of storing entries in either the traditional Blosxom style files, or in its own database format.

The database offers significant performance improvements over the file system; especially when you're working with folksonomies. There was previously no way for me to generate my tag cloud and related links without parsing parts of entry entry file on my site; and with about 200 entries right now, my response times for a typical page request were very near 2.5 seconds.

With the new database schema in place, and a complete rewrite of the underlying folksonomy engine to make use of it, I'm looking at about 1 second response times, which is a significant improvement. I'd recommend that anyone who decides to switch to Blosxonomy start using it, but the Blosxom style entry support will always be there too :).

To facilitate the migration, Blosxonomy also now has a utility to convert your entries between the two formats, so you can move back and forth as you like. For now, it's also the easiest way to get new entries into the database - just make a Blosxom style post and import it. Similary, updating old entries can be achieved by exporting the entry, editing it as you would any Blosxom post, and then reimporting it -- a process which does not affect your timestamps :).

I have one or two more things to clean up, and then it'll be available for download over at Blosxonomy. Stay tuned!

I spent a little while tonight getting ramped up to finally implement a database layer for Blosxonomy, and discovered that getting Ruby DBI working was more difficult that I expected. In particular, it turns out my Mac had multiple versions of Ruby installed, resulting in mis-linked binaries that cause abnormal terminations when I tried to use DBI. The specific error I got was:

/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/powerpc-darwin8.3.0/postgres.bundle: [BUG] Bus Error

Here's what I did to resolve this error and get DBI working:

Cleanup your Rubies

OS X 10.4 ships with Ruby 1.8.2. I had also installed Fink, which installed Ruby 1.8.1. I don't recall if I caused it to do that, or if it was a dependency of something else. This was my first problem. You can check to see if you have them both installed by doing:

/sw/bin/ruby --version
/usr/bin/ruby --version

Ideally, only /usr/bin/ruby will work, and /sw/bin/ruby won't exist. If this is not the case, you should remove the Fink installation. The latest version of Ruby DBI wouldn't link against Ruby 1.8.1, it would only link against 1.8.2 or 1.8.3. To remove Fink's Ruby, I did:

fink remove ruby18-dev ruby

This removed Ruby 1.8.1 and the development header files from your system.

Next, we'll upgrade to Ruby 1.8.3 - Download 1.8.3 Here, extract the tar bundle, and perform the following steps:

configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

I have XCode 2.2 installed, and use GCC 4.0 by default and did not have any problems. You shouldn't either. This will install the new Ruby over the old one, and also install the new development headers. Confirm that the installation was successful:

ruby --version

Should now show version 1.8.3

Install Ruby PostgreSQL

Download the latest snapshot PostgreSQL Ruby bindings from http://ruby.scripting.ca/postgres/. At the time of this writing, the latest snapshot is 20051127, which is compatible with PostgreSQL 6, 7 and 8. The installation is simple:

ruby extconf.rb \
	--with-pgsql-include-dir=/path/to/postgres/includes \
	--with-pgsql-lib-dir=/path/to/postgres/libs

make
sudo make install

You can omit the --with-pgsql... options if you have PostgreSQL installed in a standard location. I installed PostgreSQL 8.1 using Fink, and did not need to specify these options.

Ruby DBI

Finally, we'll install the DBI library. You can download it from their Rubyforge project page. At the time of this writing, version 0.0.23 is the latest, released on May 20, 2004

Again, installation is very easy, just do:

ruby setup.rb config --with=dbi,dbd_pg
ruby setup.rb setup
ruby setup.rb install

--with=dbi,dbd_pg tells the config to prepare the DBI library, and the PostgreSQL driver. You can specify as many plugin drivers as you like in that. Popular ones will include dbd_mysql, dbd_odbc and dbd_db2. Once this step is complete, you'll be able to connect to your PostgreSQL databases using DBI.

A very very very short sample

Here's the quick sample I was using to test that DBI was properly installed. It's very simple and doesn't do anything at all, but it makes calls to DBI enough to have caused the error earlier.

require 'dbi'
dbh = DBI.connect('DBI:pg:databasename')

dbh.disconnect