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".  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.