Pythian Group

As previously reported, last week-end’s activities could be summarized as me going to town on a yak herd with a lawnmower. And although the rest of Saturday and this morning haven’t been as fast and furious as Saturday morning, there’s a few more things to report:
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[yanick@enkidu shuck]$ perl -MFile::Find::Rule -MFile::Slurp=slurp \
    -E'say slurp $_ for File::Find::Rule->file->name("news")->in(".")'

In a turn of events so monumental that it can only possibly be a sign that Ragnarok is nigh upon us, an early adopter implementation of Perl 6 has been released. The number of blog entries that it generated is, as one might expect, quite massive. But most important is, the downloads — both for Unix and Windows — are available on Github. Don’t lose any time! Go, download, compile, and get a taste of what the new kid on the block has to offer.

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The first non-development version of XML::XSS has been released on CPAN. The big delta since the last blog entry (XPathScript Reborn) is the re-introduction of templates, and a generous slathering of overloaded shortcuts for stylesheet definitions.

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A long, long time ago, Matt Sergeant (of SpamAssassin fame) came up with an XML application server for Apache called AxKit. It was quite nifty, and offered many ways to transform XML documents. One of them was an home-brewed stylesheet language called XPathScript, which very quickly caught my fancy. It had a very Perlish way of doing things and was feeling infinitely more ergonomic to me than, say, the visual tag-storm that is XSLT. So, quite naturally, it was not long before I found myself wanting to use it not only in the context of an AxKit, but as a generic XML transformer. A little hacking happened to decouple the core engine from its Apache roots, and XML::XPathScript was born.

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From my previous post on TXK rollup patch, you already know the significance of adctxinf.tmp file in $AD_TOP/admin/template directory. It has wealth of information about different XML tags in the Context XML file of an Apps 11i instance. In relation to the same file, now I want to share with you all a small XSL (XML style sheet) file I wrote back in 2005. It makes adctxinf.tmp much more readable; all tags are presented in a tabular format in the browser.

For users of Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, go directly to this link to view the file. Those of you who want to have an offline copy, download that file and vasu.xsl to same directory and open adctxinf.xml in any app of your choice. Its just a very simple XSL file, but it should make life a little easier. My goal when I wrote this stylesheet was to make the Context XML file itself much more human-readable. But I never got much time to work on that.

It’s true — XML is for machines; HTML is for humans.

I was very pleased when I heard about Oracle adding pivot functionality in select statements. Finally — we wouldn’t have to copy the data to a spreadsheet or code a ton of sum(case when col1 = 'X' then amount else 0 end) total_X for each column we would want to display.

I am basically looking for three things in a pivot-style query:

1. the ability to specify which column will be pivoted as one or more columns in the resulting query
2. row subtotals
3. column subtotals

The first item is the only one that really matters. I can work around the other two, so let’s get started.

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