Rename a MySQL database

Recently I needed to rename a MySQL database I was working with to make way for another with the same name. When I looked around for how to do this it seemed that the only option was to create the new database and then copy each table to it, via INSERT...SELECTs or a dump and import. It was quite a large database and this would have been very time consuming.

After discussing it with a colleague we came up with another way to do it by using bash to iterate over each table in the schema and then use the RENAME TABLE command:

for TABLE in `mysql -u[USERNAME] -p[PASSWORD] [OLD DB] -e "SHOW TABLES" -B -N -s`; do mysql -u[USERNAME] -p[PASSWORD] [OLD DB] -e "RENAME TABLE [OLD DB].$TABLE TO [NEW DB].$TABLE"; done;

This worked a treat (I've been using my new database reliably for a while now) and was fast too!

Symlinks in Windows

Not strictly a LAMP tip this as it's for Windows but I found it useful recently.

I'm using the rather awesome XAMPP to do some development for one of my personal sites on my Windows machine and I wanted to symlink my codebase into XAMPP's equivalent of a 'public_html' folder (they call it 'htdocs'). I tried simply creating a shortcut but this doesn't work as a shortcut isn't a direct pointer but is a file in itself so Apache just tries to read that file.

After much Googling I discovered that, since Vista, Microsoft have introduced a symlinking function, MKLINK:

MKLINK /D C:\path\to\link C:\path\to\target

The /D specifies a link to a directory as the default is to a file.

This worked a treat on my Windows 7 machine! Who knew Vista introduced something useful?! ;)

Colour Schemes

This is more for designers than developers but some of us have to do both :)

When coming up with a colour scheme for a site or UI it's a good idea to use colours that compliment each other. This isn't just a design thing, it's partly mathematical and there are some sites out there that can calculate compatible colours for you.

This is a good example: http://colorschemedesigner.com/

Another thing that can be useful is the ability to blend two colours together. http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/color-blend/ allows you to input two hex colour values and it will give you the resulting hex colour value.