Blog Archived

Whilst Blogger has been a good platform so far I've had great difficulty in dealing with code block and syntax highlighting.  I have therefore decided to move to a combination of GitHub Pages and Pelican for the new site.

The new site can be found at http://linuxjedi.co.uk/

libAttachSQL now in Beta!

After three successful alpha releases I have today pushed up the last major feature prior to the 1.0 release of libAttachSQL.  Therefore v0.4.0 has been released today and is the first beta release.  I have been working on a few other things for HP's Advanced Technology Group hence why this is a little more delayed than I would like.  But I have made sure there is a lot of good things in this release.

The big new feature in this release is Server-side Prepared Statement support.  You now have the ability to prepare, execute and fetch the results for a prepared statement and the API for this is non-blocking as before.

Other things in this release are:

• Compiler fixes for GCC 4.9, RedHat/CentOS 6.x and Python 3.x (Python is used for building the documentation)
• Bug fixes for SSL and buffer issues
• Much faster building on multi-core systems

In the next couple of weeks I'll write some blog posts on how to use this API as well as the rest of libAttachSQL.

Speaking about libAttachSQL at Percona Live London

As many of you know I'm actively developing libAttachSQL and am rapidly heading towards the first beta release.  For those who don't, libAttachSQL is a lightweight C connector for MySQL servers with a non-blocking API.  I am developing it as part of my day job for HP's Advanced Technology Group.  It was in-part born out of my frustration when dealing with MySQL and eventlet in Python back when I was working on various Openstack projects.  But there are many reasons why this is a good thing for C/C++ applications as well.

What you may not know is I will be giving a talk about libAttachSQL, the technology behind it and the decisions we made to get here at Percona Live London.  The event is on the 3rd and 4th of November at the Millennium Gloucester Conference Centre.  I highly recommend attending if you wish to find out more about libAttachSQL or any of the new things going on in the MySQL world.

As for the project itself, I'm currently working on the prepared statement code which I hope to have ready in the next few days.  0.4.0 will certainly be a big release in terms of changes.  There has been feedback from some big companies which is awesome to hear and I have fixed a few problems they have found for 0.4.0.  Hopefully you will be hearing more about that in the future.

For anyone there I'll be in London from the 2nd to the 5th of November and am happy to meet with anyone and chat about the work we are doing.

New version of libAttachSQL, C connector for MySQL released!

It has been just over 2 weeks since the last libAttachSQL version was released.  I had a great vacation in the middle which for once meant that I didn't do any work for the week I was away :)

For those who don't know about it, libAttachSQL is a lightweight, non-blocking C connector for MySQL servers.  It is Apache 2.0 licensed so plays well with both Open Source and Commercially licensed applications.  I have been developing it for 2 months now as part of my work for HP's Advanced Technology Group.  It is hosted on GitHub and uses many freely available tools (such as Travis CI) to host and test various parts of the project.

Once again I thank everyone for the feedback I have received.  You all make it even more awesome to be working on this :)

So, on to the new version 0.3.0 alpha release.  This time round we have been focusing on zlib compression and SSL support.  Both of these features have been added and neither impacts the non-blocking aspect of the library.  The SSL part in particular was quite new to me, I've coded SSL into applications many times in the past, but I've never done it in a non-blocking way before.  It posed some interesting challenges but it was fun and appears to be working great now.

The biggest changes in this release are:

• Fixes to the test cases and improvements to the CI used
• Documentation improvements
• Many minor bug fixes
• Protocol compression (zlib) support
• SSL encryption (OpenSSL) support
• 32bit compiling works

For more information see the Version History section of the docs.

On to the next release which should complete the biggest pre-release features.  From there we can head towards our first GA release.

If you have any questions, feedback, etc... please feel free to leave comments, email me or open a GitHub issue.