Last Week in Drizzle

Welcome to this week's edition of "Last Week in Drizzle".  As an introduction this week I would like to quote John David Duncan's recent Facebook post: "And what's in the weather forecast for next week? Drizzle.".  Yes, our first GA release is due next week, does that mean the development pace has slowed?  Heck no!  Over 150,000 lines of bzr diff in the trunk since last week and quite a few branches still in the merge queue going through our extensive regression testing system.

Google Summer of Code

We have once again applied to be part of the Google Summer of Code program.  We had some great students last year and some new faces interested in being students on projects for Drizzle have already started taking on some low-hanging-fruit tasks to get them used to our code and processes.  We will have a sign-up form up soon so that anyone interested in being part of the program which I will blog about when ready.  In the mean time you can read our wiki page about participation and if you have any suggestions for projects this year, please let us know.

Race to GA

We are just a few short days away now from the first Drizzle GA.  The release schedule for Drizzle7 is as follows:

RC1 - 14th February 2011 Released
RC2 - 28th February 2011 Released
GA - 14th March 2011

Engine Removal

By "engine removal" I don't mean the poor state of my car but the fact that we have removed some of the bundled storage engines from Drizzle this week.  This is because some needed maintaining, some didn't quite fit in with Drizzle and some just plain didn't compile any more.  This also helps us as developers support Drizzle by concentrating on the storage engines that are important to users.  Will the removed engines be gone forever?  If there is demand for them and they can be maintained, they will return.  The removed engines are archive, blackhole, filesystem_engine, blitzdb, csv and pbxt.

Node.js

Mariano Iglesias has created a node.js binding for libdrizzle.  In his words "the libdrizzle binding is outperforming node.js mysql bindings by a factor of at least 2 to 1" which is great to hear, especially since it can be used against a MySQL server.  An example of how to use it can be found here.

Libdrizzle Only Option

Monty Taylor as added the configure option --without-server to go along with "make libdrizzle" which will only compile libdrizzle from the drizzle trunk.  This should help anyone who only requires libdrizzle from source and doesn't want to have the dependencies required for the server to get it.

Authentication Defaults

Brian Aker has outlined changes to authentication such as the requirement of a username to connect to Drizzle and only listening on localhost by default.  Further details can be found on the mailing list where he is also asking for feedback on changes.

Final Thoughts

This time of year is incredibly busy for us, preparing for the GA release whilst getting ready to give lots of conference talks and other such things.  But despite this spirits are still high.  I for one am very proud of what has been achieved in Drizzle by the team at Rackspace and other companies and community members involved.  I hope new users coming to Drizzle find it as exciting as we do.

As always if you have any feedback or topics you would like me to cover, please let me know.