Last Week in Drizzle

Welcome to this week's (slightly late) edition of Last Week in Drizzle.  This week sees the kick-off of many new features for the next release of Drizzle codenamed 'Fremont' and the mailing list is a hive of activity around Google Summer of Code.  I apologise for publishing a few days late this week and will try and stay on-track for future editions.

Fremont

In the tradition of Drizzle using Seattle road names in alphabetical order for codenames the next release of Drizzle is codenamed 'Fremont' (the current GA release is codenamed 'Elliott').  Monty Taylor has outlined the merge process going forward as can be seen in his mailing list post.

Google Summer of Code

We have been accepted for Google Summer of Code 2011 and are getting a lot of interest from potential applicants.  If you are interested in working on the Drizzle project as part of GSoC we have the following recommended instructions:

1. Check out our wiki page on potential projects


2. Email the mailing list with an introduction about yourself and join the Freenode #drizzle IRC channel to chat to us


3. Look at our low-hanging-fruit tasks and try to take one or two on.  This gets you used to the code and launchpad processes as well as gives us an insight into your abilities

Xtrabackup

Stewart Smith has been working hard on integrating Percona's Xtrabackup with Drizzle.  Xtrabackup is an online backup tool for InnoDB much like MySQL's Enterprise Backup.  This is nearly ready for merging into Drizzle and Stewart has written a great blog post on the subject on his blog.

Catalogs

Stewart has been a real busy guy this last week, another project he has been working on is getting catalogs support working with more than one catalog.  For those not familiar with catalogs they are a way of totally isolating one user's databases from another, similar to having multiple installations of Drizzle in one box but all running from one daemon.  In the GA release a lot of the framework already existed for catalogs and everything in it runs from a catalog called 'local'.  More information on the progress Stewart has made can be found on his blog post.

Libdrizzle 2.0

In Fremont we are working towards Libdrizzle 2.0.  This is a C++ version of Libdrizzle with a C compatible API.  Eventually it will contain new features such as native sharding (we are still working on filling out a potential features list for it).  For now in the Drizzle trunk you can see libdrizzle has been moved to libdrizzle-1.0 and a new libdrizzle-2.0 directory exists for the new work.

Multi-Master Replication

David Shrewsbury has been working on multi-master replication in Drizzle with a beta release ready to try.  By multi-master I mean having multiple masters write to a single slave.  For more information on this work take a look at his blog post.

Final Thoughts

Development is starting to move forward at a rapid pace for our next GA and we have had a lot of branches merged that I haven't discussed here from people such as Olaf van der Spek who has contributed a lot towards code cleanups.

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