The heart of this method works outside of Rails, but there’s one particular convenience method that Rails provides.  Find some way to mimic that behavior, and the rest would apply.  Also, this is a MySQL-specific solution.  I haven’t tried it with any other DB systems.

We “rename” a database by moving all of its tables into a new database.  We do so via MySQL’s RENAME TABLE command.  Basically, create an empty database with the new name.  We then use our ActiveRecord connection’s “tables” method to loop over all the tables in our database, executing a RENAME TABLE from the old to the new with each iteration. “Tables” is the convenience method I mentioned above. Encapsulating this in a method we get:

def rename_database(old_db_name, new_db_name)
    ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute "CREATE DATABASE #{new_db_name}"
    ActiveRecord::Base.connection.tables.each do |table|
        ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute
            "RENAME TABLE #{old_db_name}.#{table} TO #{new_db_name}.#{table}"
    end
    ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute "DROP DATABASE #{old_db_name}"
end

Error checking is left as an (important!) exercise to the reader.  Also, you may prefer to monkey patch this into ActiveRecord itself as opposed to some odd method floating around in global space.

This presupposes that the new database destination will be on the same server.

Another way to rename a database is to mysqldump the old one to a file and then reimport it to the renamed database.  The method presented in this article is advantageous if your database has a large amount of data.  Renaming a table is almost instant.  Dumping millions of rows and reimporting them is not so instant.

Take for example the first bit you’re likely to read at SubSonic’s webpage, bit which I presume is meant to explain what SubSonic does.  “SubSonic is A Super High-fidelity Batman Utility Belt that works up your Data Access…”  I like Batman, especially since Christopher Nolan rebooted the franchise.  But I don’t care about Batman with relation to software projects.  I still don’t really know what SubSonic is after having read that.  Is it an ORM?  Is it a set of functions similar to MySQL access in PHP?  I don’t know, and they don’t seem to want to tell me.

I can stomach cleverness to about the same degree I can stomach horseradish.  It ought to enhance the content, and it can in the right hands.  The SubSonic authors WAY overdo it, and their writing style hides all the content behind a shroud of utter nonsense.  Hopefully they code better than they write English (a common engineering foible shared by this author as well).

They also use a LOT of screencasts.  Screencasts have their place, when done well (example).  However, the 1 that I’ve looked into up to this point goes on about how easy it is to set up SubSonic while scrolling past the code the author is adding after about 1 second.  Screencasts don’t have the best pause mechanism, so it’ s pretty easy to miss what the author is typing.  You also can’t copy/paste from a screencast.

More will follow.  Since there isn’t actually anything useful on how to set SubSonic up in a client application, and that’s what I’m writing, I’ll do that once and if I figure it out.  The frustration had risen to a point where I needed to vent, and where better than the solitude of a blog?

So what’s the issue?  Well, all of the spammers post pretty much the same message.  It shows up in my browser as “??????? ?? ???????? ?? ?????,” or something like that, and all the associated URLs end in .ru.  Now, I don’t speak Russian– let’s get that right there– so what I say next doesn’t carry the same authority it would if those URLs ended in “.fr.”  For some reason I imagine written Russian having more than a single character at its disposal as opposed to this Morse code variant.  Perhaps some of you non-spammer Russian speakers out there can confirm this.

Why can’t Akismet pick up on this?  Russian link farm with no message content– seems like a no-brainer to me. The only thing I can figure is that the messages contain more than just question marks, but I don’t have the right alphabet installed on my computer. Which is just as well. I don’t want to learn how Viagra ads are written in Russian until and if I learn Russian for real.

For the time being I’ve shut down comments on my Apple Strikes Again post to see if that can exorcise the demon, comrade.

So hopefully the 5 visitors I’ve had here will lend me enough Google street cred that this link to your blog brings you .3 visitors.

If you wonder why I was using your sequel or whether or not you had even written the first work requiring a sequel, then I can say with at least .9 certainty that this post doesn’t apply to you.

“Podcast” is a useless, branded neologism for audio files that come out on a regular basis.  Nevertheless, audio files that come out on a regular basis are enjoyable.  I “subscribe” to the Dave Ramsey “podcast.”  I also bike to work.  Those may seem unrelated, but in fact the latter is the cause of the former.

Biking to work falls into the high-risk class of activities, but is closer to the moderate-risk class than, say, sky diving without a parachute.  Folks who don’t bike to work don’t much notice those who do. I’m all for live and let live, but this lack of attention can sometimes break that pattern for bikers.  The point is that just how a pregnant woman has to eat for 2, I have to pay attention for 2, or 3, or 4, depending on how many motorized vehicles cross my path during my commute.  That payment of attention only requires a visual debit, leaving many spare brain cycles during which my mind sits idle.  I like to fill that with sound.  Sound where I learn something is even better.

Enter audio files that come out regularly.  But sometimes I don’t listen to the Dave Ramsey audio files that come out on a regular basis, giving me a backlog.  This means that there’s more than that I haven’t heard.  Now, the genius of mp3 players is that they hold more than 1 song, and mp3 players can, generally, play all their contents without user attention between each track.

Enter the iPod.

Audio files that come out regularly are a magical class of audio file for the iPod.  The iPod, by default, cannot play 1 such audio file and then go on to the next without user interaction.  In fact, at the end of 1 such track, it repeats the same track, even though the menu is showing a list of all availabe Dave Ramsey audio files that come out on a regular basis.  Now, I realize that desiring this feature just means I’m using the iPod wrong, because only holiness emanates from Cupertino.  Nonetheless, academic freedom dictates that I must challenge such dogmas and question all authority.

Assuming all cows are perfect spheres, this as a default behavior makes perfect sense.  And it gets better!  If we define “intuitive” as “difficult” or “requires somewhere-above-average-but-less-than-expert knowledge of system to use,” then Apple has provided an intuitive way to overcome this problem.  This blog post describes the solution.  I mean, who wouldn’t have thought to create a “Smart Playlist” to do something so basic complicated as playing the next track?  Who actually uses their mp3 player that way anyway?

However, if not all cows are, in fact, perfect spheres and we define “intuitive” the same way that Merriam-Webster does, then to get the next track to play, one should just have the next track on the device.  Ergo, this is an Apple fail.

Conclusions:

1. danandchoka deserve a pizza.
2. The fact that goole has just over 400k hits for “ipod podcast play next” seems to indicate that I’m not alone in this problem.

Besides venting another Apple-related spleen, I wrote this post to bump up danandchoka’s post.  I really did appreciate finding the answer to this problem.