SkySQL - The Return of the Jedi

The last few weeks have been particularly quiet from me on the blogging front.  Behind the scenes things have been quite the opposite so here is a summary of things past, present and future.

Rackspace and Drizzle

If you have read my last 'Last Week in Drizzle' post you will know that Rackspace are no longer supporting Drizzle.  They have done a fantastic job so far and have decided to pass the baton to other companies.  As for the staff, they wished to redeploy us to other teams which is something I personally was not keen on.  I would rather remain within the MySQL/Drizzle sphere which I would have no longer been able to do effectively inside Rackspace any more.

Drizzle itself will go on to do great things without Rackspace, there are a number of companies that announced support for Drizzle during the O'Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo and Google Summer of Code is still going ahead as planned.

MySQL Conference

For me personally it was the busiest conference I have ever attended, this is mostly down to the three talks I had to give on top of booth duty, meetings and Drizzle Developer Day.  I had some fantastic feedback from people whilst there on many subjects such as Drizzle and the MySQL 5.1 Plugins Development book.  It was great to meet up with old friends and make some new ones and I hope that the conference will continue for many years to come.

SkySQL

The day after returning from the conference I started my new role as Senior Sustaining Engineer at SkySQL (very jetlagged and in hindsight I should have given myself a day or two to recover!).  In this role I not only go back into supporting customers but also developing tools around the MySQL/Drizzle sphere.  I feel very honoured to be working with the team (many of whom I am working with for a second time), they have really done a great job of capturing the traditional MySQL spirit.

One of the first things I have been working on is a new version of mydumper, once this is ready I will create a separate blog post about it.  I think it is a fantastic tool and hope that it will be able to help many users in the future.

Google Summer of Code

SkySQL have encouraged me to continue my work on Drizzle which I have also been doing.  As part of this I am a mentor for Google Summer of Code, a student called Olaf van der Spek will be working on improving the libdrizzle client API under my guidance.  Something I am very much looking forward to.

The Return of the Jedi

So, I am back in a support type role whilst also developing useful tools and patches to enhance the usability of MySQL, I will also be blogging more and getting involved in the community/ecosystem in other ways.  This is very similar to what I was doing at Sun/Oracle but for a company designed from the ground up to be much better for the staff and customers.  I am looking forward the the bright future of SkySQL.

Last Week in Drizzle

Welcome to this week's edition of Last Week in Drizzle.  Unfortunately I could not write this at the Drizzle Developer Day because it is was much busier than I expected.  So this one had to wait until I landed in the UK :)

O'Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo

Last week was the MySQL Conference which at this point should probably be called the MySQL & friends or the Open Database Conference.  We had many talks, great exposure and some fantastic questions and feedback of ideas we had never thought of during the week.  I urge anyone who wasn't there to watch Brian Aker's keynote on the State of Drizzle.

Drizzle Developer Day

On the Friday after the conference we had Drizzle Developer Day which contained people from every level, new users to some of the biggest names in MySQL development.  A great many topics were discussed such as the catalogs work, replication and storage engines.  There were also discussions governance and I hope there will be announcements on this in the near future.

Development Goes On!

All last week the Drizzle Developers at Rackspace were giving talks and meeting people at the conference so we didn't get a lot of time for actually writing code, but there have been many branches and merge requests thanks to the fantastic community around Drizzle.  I still haven't caught up with all the work merged in within the last week!

Drizzle Support

A few companies have come out in the last week offering support services for Drizzle such as Blue Gecko and Percona which is fantastic to see.  This is on top of companies such as SkySQL already providing support for Drizzle.  There could also be announcements from more companies in the near future, so watch this space!

Rackspace and Drizzle

If you have watched the keynote from Brian Aker referenced above you will notice near the end he talks briefly about the developers getting hired by other companies.  Rackspace have done a fantastic job in supporting and funding us right up through the GA but unfortunately can no longer go on providing resources for us.  What does that mean for us?  Most of the developers who work for Rackspace are moving to other companies, many of whom will continue to work on Drizzle.  What does the mean for Drizzle?  Not a whole lot really, development will continue as before.  The great thing about Drizzle is the Rackspace developers were actually the minority, there are many other companies as well as community developers involved.  The features that were originally planned will continue to be developed, Google Summer of Code will also go on as before.

My Next Adventure

My last day at Rackspace was last Friday, today I start my new adventure as Senior Sustaining Engineer at SkySQL.  This means I will still get to work on Drizzle as well as providing fantastic support and development resources for MySQL and MariaDB.

Final Thoughts

I'd personally like to thank everyone for their fantastic feedback at the conference and developer day last week.  It is great to hear that people think we are on the right path with the technology and many of the ideas and discussions that came up last week will help shape the future of Drizzle.

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

Last Week in Drizzle

Welcome to this week’s Last Week in Drizzle.  This again will be a relatively short edition as the 2011 O'Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo is next week and I'm currently packing for it!

Drizzle in Real Time Data Visualization

Many of you will have seen the awesome real time data map of Mozilla's downloads on their glow site.  One thing that got me really excited this week was work by Marcus Eriksson to do the same thing using Drizzle and it's RabbitMQ connector.  The live demo of this has been hosted on a Rackspace cloud server and can be found here.

Percona's Contributions

It has been very encouraging this week to see staff at Percona submit merge requests.  So far there have been several InnoDB branches committed which add cool features such as saving the buffer pool to disk (actually identifiers for the pool so it is really small) for restoring upon server start as well as performance improvements.  Many thanks to the Percona guys for you hard work so far!

Drizzle Amazon AMI

Bluegecko have created a 32bit Drizzle AMI image using RPMs (which I believe was not an easy feat given how different it is to other OS's we compile for).  Anyone wanting to try this should check out their blog post on it which gives details on how to access the AMI.

Google Summer of Code

We have had many submissions to Google Summer of Code this year and it is unfortunate that we cannot take everyone on via. GSoC.  But there has been some awesome submissions this year, we are really impressed with the amount of effort people have put in their proposals.  If you want to get a last-minute submission in you can do so via. the GSoC site, the deadline is 12:00 Pacific Time today.

Final Thoughts

That about wraps up the big events of the past week.  If you are in Santa Clara, CA next week please come along to one of the many Drizzle talks at the 2011 O'Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo we will also have a booth in the Expo hall where you can come and chat to us.

Next week's edition will be coming to you live from the Drizzle Developer Day, Friday 15th April at the Hilton across the road from the Hyatt (where the conference is held).  As always if you have any feedback or topics you would like me to cover, please let me know.

Last Week in Drizzle

Welcome to this week's Last Week in Drizzle.  Today will be a relatively short edition due to the work everyone is doing preparing for the 2011 O'Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo and Google Summer of Code.

First Fremont Tarball

The first tarball of the Fremont development branch of Drizzle was created this week, following our tradition of releasing a tarball every two weeks.  It includes many experimental things such as the libdrizzle-2.0 separation and the multiple master to single slave replication.

For those wanting the stable release we suggest sticking to the Elliott branch which our GA was cut from.  New releases for this will be created much less frequently and will only include bug fixes.

Xtrabackup

Stewart Smith's work on integrating Xtrabackup into Drizzle has now been merged into Fremont.  When installing it will create a binary called 'drizzlebackup.innobase'.

Multi-Master Replication

By this I mean the work going into replication of multiple masters to a single slave.  Patrick Crews has written the first part of blog post covering the testing of this new feature.

Drizzle Migration

I have written an article for The H Online called 'A migrator's guide to Drizzle' which was published yesterday.  For anyone migrating from MySQL to Drizzle this should act as a useful guide.  I will also be giving a talk at the 2011 O'Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo entitled 'MySQL to Drizzle, stress free migration' which will be along similar lines.

FreeBSD

FreeBSD support has initially been dropped for Drizzle due to issues we were having with that platform.  It may well be coming back soon with the aid of Greg Larkin from FreeBSD who has offered to help get things running again.

Final Thoughts

If you happen to be in the vicinity of Santa Clara, CA between the 11th and 14th April we have quite a few talks on Drizzle as well as a booth in the expo hall.  It is a great opportunity to meet the team behind Drizzle.

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