Refactoring SQL Applications

Appendix B. Tools

THIS APPENDIX DESCRIBES TWO TOOLS, THE SOURCE CODE FOR WHICH IS AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD, and which I hope you’ll find useful. The first one is actually a pair of programs, mklipsum and lipsum, which I briefly described in Chapter 4. The second one is a Java tool called Roughbench, which I have used often in my tests, in particular in Chapter 7.

These tools are released under the GPL license and come with the usual disclaimers.

mklipsum and lipsum

mklipsum and lipsum are tools for generating arbitrary random text. The source code is written in C, and I prepared it using GNU Autotools (as best as I could). Windows executables are also provided (they have been ported with Mingwin). Both programs require SQLite3, available from http://www.sqlite.org. For the record, mklipsum contains nontrivial SQL code.

How to Build mklipsum and lipsum

On a *nix machine, after having uncompressed and unarchived the files, you should be able to build the programs by typing ./configure, then make and make install (read the INSTALL file for more information and to learn how to customize default settings).

How to Use mklipsum and lipsum

Using mklipsum and lipsum is fairly simple. mklipsum prepares an SQLite file for use by lipsum from text that it tokenizes and analyzes. The text is read from the standard input. The SQLite file stores the words using UTF8 encoding, and it should also be the character set used in the input. If, however, the library libiconv, which converts character sets, is available ...