Migrating MVHS Alumni Directory data from BerkleyDB to MySQL

I recently rewrote large parts of the MVHS Alumni Directory to use MySQL instead of BerkleyDB. I’ve been on paternity leave from Yahoo! for 7 weeks now, and this is one of the few projects on my todo list that I have actually completed.

I’ve been maintaining this list of alumni for over 10 years. It began as a bunch of Perl 4 scripts and a single text file (colon-delimited, a la /etc/passwd) back when I was an undergraduate in college, and has morphed over the years as I have moved from ISP to ISP.

I was forced to port it to Perl 5 at one point when one of my ISPs did an OS upgrade, and although I got it to work, there was no way I was going to go through the pain to make it use strict. Later, I rewrote all of the DBM access routines to use DB_File::Lock to avoid race conditions that occasionally corrupted the data.

At the end of last year, my ISP (DreamHost) upgraded their Linux distro from Perl 5.6 to Perl 5.8 and everthing broke again. Plus, the BerkleyDB file format on their new distro was incompatible with the old files, so I had to recreate the files from a text dump. I got it working again with a little hackery, but still wasn’t ready to spend the time to dump BerkleyDB for MySQL.

Well, it’s finally done. The only new functionality is an RSS feed for each graduating class. It was fun to do a little bit of hacking.

The new version is about 7,000 lines of code, and it’s still very ugly, largely because I have tried to adhere to the Principle of Least Change, and I wasn’t such a great coder back in 1995. Download it if you so desire; it is released under the BSD License. The README needs a little updating, but the Makefile should actually work.