A list of my favourite podcast episodes

From tech, to leadership, through people, architecture, design and music. A curated collection of my personal favourites.

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Mirth: recover space when mirthdb grows out of control

I was recently asked to recover a mirth instance whose embedded database had grown to fill all available space so this is just a note-to-self kind of post. Btw: the recovery, depending on db size and disk speed, is going to take long. The problem A 1.8 Mirth Connect instance was started, then forgotten (well neglected, actually). The user also forgot to setup pruning so the messages filled the embedded Derby database until it grew to fill all the available space on the disk. The SO is linux. The solution First of all: free some disk space so that the database can be started in embedded mode from the cli. You can also copy the whole mirth install to another server if you cannot free space. Depending on db size you will need a corresponding amount of space: in my case a 5GB db required around 2GB to start, process logs and then store the temp files during shrinking. Then open a shell as the user that mirth runs as (you're not running it as root, are you?) and cd in...
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Quasi-code with Apache Camel

Debating whether to go no-code but worried about unclear licensing, the dreadful we-need-to-rewrite-it dram down the road or django/rails/spring boot and its relatively higher upfront cost? There's a third way: quasi-code with Apache Camel . It still amazes me how few people know about the swiss-army knife of integrations.
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An alternative auditing strategy for Grails apps

In some applications it is useful, and in some case required, that the application audits some or all database operations: for instance to track when a user updates, deletes or inserts a record. In Grails this is often handled by a plugin, like the Audit Logging plugin, which hooks into the Hibernate events and then logs the details to an audit table, including a timestamp, the user (if available) who initiated the operation and the type of operation. Unfortunately the Audit Logging plugin suffers from some issues  and if you, like me, have to ship today then you can only roll your own solution. In this post I will lay out a solution which is simple, efficient and should work in most scenarios. The general requirements are: only one datasource the underlying dbms must have triggers and some kind of session variables (most do, but I'll focus on Oracle) quartz jobs, background operations and other activities not necessarily initiated by an http request must properly initi...
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