Re^3: Using DBIx::Class::Schema::Loader to determine constraints

[pokki]

(snip) It has been suggested that I try DBIx::Class::Schema::Loader. As I can see, SQL::Translator supports all of the DBMSs I wanted to support, so I am fine with SQL::Translator, too.

That would be because DBICSL uses SQL::Translator behind the scenes, as far as I can tell. Using SQL::Translator directly is just cutting out the middle man.

What I could not get from the documentation is in which form the dump of the database structure which is passed as second parameter to parse() is expected (for each supported DBMS). Do you know the expected format?

The parse() function expects the raw DDL as a string. In my example, data.sql is just your DDL as is:

CREATE TABLE a (u integer, PRIMARY KEY (u));
CREATE TABLE t (i integer, j integer, u integer, Primary key (i,j), co
+nstraint fkey1 foreign key (u) references a (u));
CREATE TABLE s (j integer, r1 integer, r2 integer, constraint fkey for
+eign key (r1,r2) references t (i,j));

The various SQL::Translator::Parser::$FOOPARSER classes document individually what grammar they support. Sometimes a few bits are missing, but the author and the community are rather responsive and it's not too hard to patch it yourself if you know the basics of writing a grammar. "Normal" MySQL syntax is a problem, though. The ANSI compatibility mode of mysqldump seems to produce parser-friendlier output, but even then I usually have to tweak it until the parser accepts it.

At $work I maintain an SQLite schema as the reference DDL for a database ("if SQLite supports it, everything supports it -- and if they don't they have no excuse"). DBICSL (through SQL::Translator) is pretty good at turning it into a DBIC schema which then produces MySQL-compatible DDL for deployment (and diff files for upgrading). It even knows about a few things not encoded in the grammar itself, e.g. old versions of MySQL don't support VARCHAR columns with a size larger than 255, so VARCHAR(500) in the DDL would eventually turn into a TEXT column. So far everything I've thrown at it, constraints, keys, cascade actions have been supported (cascade action support is recent though). I've only ever had trouble with triggers, and had to work around this by providing custom code for each supported DBMS.