Using Auto Increment Fields to Your Advantage

I just found, and read, Clément Delafargue’s post “Why Auto Increment Is A Terrible Idea” (via @CoreRamiro). I agree that an opaque primary key is very nice and clean from an information architecture viewpoint.

However, in practice, a serial (or monotonically increasing) key can be handy to have around. I was reminded of this during a recent situation where we (app developers & ops) needed to be highly confident that a replica was consistent before performing a failover. (None of us had access to the back end to see what the DB thought the replication lag was.)

Sphinx tip: mailhtml

I often find that I want to email around a doc I’ve put together with sphinx (I often use the *diag or graphviz extensions). Sadly, the world hasn’t embraced the obvious way of supporting this via ePub [1] readers everwhere. What I want is plain html output, with nothing fancy. There’s probably a style out there, but I just add the following target to the Makefile generated by sphinx-quickstart:

mailhtml:
        $(SPHINXBUILD) -b singlehtml -D html_theme=epub $(ALLSPHINXOPTS) $(BUILDDIR)/singlehtml
        @echo
        @echo "Build finished. The HTML page is in $(BUILDDIR)/singlehtml."