Libdrizzle 5.1.4 released!

I've just created a release of Libdrizzle 5.1.4 (the BSD licensed C connector for MySQL servers) which for me is one of the most exciting releases to date.

Why?
Not because the amount of features or anything that we have added, in fact this is mostly a minor release with bug fixes.  It is because Brian Aker and I didn't submit the most code for it.  That honour goes to Wim Lewis from The Omni Group who has done a fantastic job fixing up Libdrizzle.

As for the release itself the main fixes revolve around cleaning up code and many fixes to the server-side prepared statement handling.  Behind the scenes Wim has supplied many improvements to the test suite and Brian has setup more platforms to test against in Jenkins.  All this to help improve the code quality of Libdrizzle.

You can download this new release along with older releases from the Libdrizzle downloads page.

MySQL and the forks in the road

There's a lot of activity in the MySQL ecosystem currently. I've written an article for The H which takes a look at MySQL and the various forks and spinoffs to give an overview of where MySQL's community and close competition is currently at.

http://www.h-online.com/open/features/MySQL-and-the-forks-in-the-road-1829242.html

First version of Drizzle Tools for MySQL servers released

Today marks the first release of Drizzle Tools for MySQL servers.  Drizzle Tools aims to be a collection of useful utilities to use with MySQL servers based around the work on the Libdrizzle Redux project.

In this first version there is one utility in the tree called 'drizzle-binlogs'.  If you've seen me talk about this tool before it is because it used to be included in the Libdrizzle 5.1 source but has now been moved here to be developed independently.  For those who haven't 'drizzle-binlogs' is a tool which connects to a MySQL server as a slave, retrieves the binary log files and stores them locally.  This could be used as part of a backup solution or a rapid way to help create a new MySQL master server.

Due to the API changes before the Libdrizzle API became stable Drizzle Tools requires a minimum of Libdrizzle 5.1.3 to be installed.

I wanted to release this sooner but unfortunately most of my time has been taken up with the first release of the project I manage and develop for my day job (HP Cloud's Load Balancer as a Service, more about this in a future blog post).

In the not too distant future there will be more tools included in the Drizzle Tools releases, I have the next one already 50% developed.  In the mean time you can download the first version here.

Developing Libdrizzle

This weekend I am supposed to be giving a talk at FOSDEM on Libdrizzle.  Unfortunately my kids and I all fell ill on Thursday (my wife appears to be immune) so I had to cancel my plans (infecting 5000 people didn't seem wise :)

Instead I am writing this blog post about Libdrizzle and my part in it which covers some of what I was going to talk about.

History of Libdrizzle

Libdrizzle started out as a from-scratch C connector for Drizzle and MySQL originally created by Eric Day.  It was designed to be high performance and use common standards to make it easy to work on.  In the summer of 2010 it was merged into the main Drizzle tree where development has been focused.  There were several attempts to split it out again but until now none were truly successful.

For a few years Brian Aker and I have been randomly discussing things we could have done to make the API easier for developers and users.  As well as features we could possibly add in the future.  Fast forward to Summer 2012 and I decided to do something about this.

The Dawn of Libdrizzle Redux

Around July 2012 I took the Libdrizzle 1.0 code from Drizzle trunk and got it to compile separately using CMake.  I then had the groundwork to work on some of the things we had talked about.  I called this the Libdrizzle Redux project since we were bringing new life to Libdrizzle, primarily as a MySQL Connector.

Initially this was going to be version 3.0 but it was pointed out by Henrik that 3.0 and 4.0 were used as library versions in certain packages so we went straight to 5.0.

After getting to the "It Compiles!" state the first thing I did was strip out the server side API.  I had spoken to many people over the years about the connector and each one only used the client side API, not the server side.  The other thing that was made plainly clear was the API was too complex.  There were many functions that were confusing as to whether the library or the application was supposed to allocate and free objects.  So this was massively simplified very quickly.

Libdrizzle Today

Between Brian and I there have been massive changes to the Libdrizzle code and we now have the basis for a regression suite which has already found several problems with the original code.  Just off the top of my head:

• There is a new Prepared Statement API
• There is a new Binary Log Retrieval API (in 5.1.3 this will become a callback API) which is already MySQL 5.6 checksum compatible
• Massively simplified API, the number of things needed to setup a connection and execute a query have been reduced
• Non-blocking API has been made more stable
• Windows support (via. MinGW)
• Buffer and state system massively improved
• CMake has been replace with DDM4
• We compile in C++ with many warnings switch on (C++ compiler tends to find more problems than the normal C compiler)
• 106 revisions/merges in the BZR repo.  Most of this since November 2012.

Last Sunday Brian and I had a hacking day in Seattle, we worked non-stop on Libdrizzle for nearly 12 hours, I doubt there were many sections of code that were not touched that day.

Why I Develop Libdrizzle

My day job is the Project Manager on Load Balancer as a Service at HP Cloud (you should hear a lot more about that in coming months).  Whilst this is great I don't get to touch and debug a whole lot of code any more.  So Libdrizzle is something I do in my spare time to keep my brain fully active.

I also like to think that the code will be useful to someone.  I'm actually a fan of the BSD license in this context.  It means commercial code can easily statically compile with Libdrizzle which in-turn means more MySQL Server/Percona Server/MariaDB Server adoption and more support contracts for Oracle/Percona/SkySQL/etc...

Even if no one uses the code I still find it a fun challenge and something I will continue for as long as I can.

The Future of Libdrizzle

In the next few days we will be releasing Libdrizzle 5.1.3, this will contain all the work that was done in Seattle (and my flights to/from Seattle) including a few nice API improvements.  Along with this I will create the first release of Drizzle Tools.

Drizzle Tools is a project which contains utilities for use with a MySQL server, at the moment the only one included is drizzle_binlogs which connects to a remote MySQL server as a slave and downloads the binary logs to local files as a back.  It also has a continuous mode which effectively gives an up-to-the-second backup of the data.  I have the code half-written for the next tool which will not make the first release but should be useful to many people.

Of course anyone is welcome to come hack on Librizzle and Drizzle Tools, file bugs, ask questions, etc...  The more knowledge share the better :)

There will be more posts soon showing how to use Libdrizzle and drizzle_tools as well as announcing the new features, so watch this space!

Introducing Drizzle Tools

As part of the Libdrizzle Redux project I created an example tool which was bundled with it which will connect to a MySQL server as a slave and download the binary logs to local files.  This was developed as a quick example of what can be done with the new binlog API.

Two things quickly became apparent:

1. We shouldn't really be distributing applications in a library
2. I am going to be developing more useful tools around libdrizzle and they certainly shouldn't be in the same package
3. BSD is a fantastic license for a library, but I personally prefer GPLv2 for applications

With this in mind I have pulled the drizzle_binlogs utility from Libdrizzle trunk (and therefore won't be in the 5.1.3 release) and put it in its own repository.  It has been licensed appropriately (GPLv2) and I am already beginning to develop more tools to go with it.

The are no source tarballs and PDFs of the docs for Drizzle Tools yet, but you can get the bzr tree to play with.  The Launchpad page is here.  It requires Libdrizzle 5.1.2 to build against.

Some really cool stuff coming to that tree soon which I will announce when ready :)

Enjoy!

Libdrizzle 5.1.2 released and Libdrizzle at FOSDEM

Libdrizzle is getting better and better with every release, and to reflect this we have two announcements to make.

First of all, Libdrizzle 5.1.2 has been released.  This release has several major bug fixes and performance enhancements.  Changes are as follows:

• Non-blocking Windows connections are now more stable
• Improvements to Windows building
• Unix Socket connections are now more stable
• Memory allocation/freeing cleanups (for performance and ease of code)
• Network packet buffer now much more flexible
• Many performance improvements (the bundled drizzle_binlogs tool is now around 10x faster on my i7 laptop)
• Several other minor bug fixes

API chages:

• drizzle_query_str() has been removed, drizzle_query() with a 0 byte length parameter now does the same thing.

As always you can download the tarball and documentation from the Libdrizzle Launchpad Page.

I'm also going to be giving a talk entitled "Libdrizzle Redux, the next-gen MySQL compatible connector" on Sunday 3rd Feb in the MySQL devroom at FOSDEM.  This will be a great chance to find out more about the work we have been doing on the connector and how it can benefit you.

A MySQL Christmas present - Libdrizzle 5.1.0

Brian Aker and I have been working hard in the last few weeks to give you a great Christmas present, Libdrizzle 5.1.0.  The MySQL compatible, BSD licensed C connector (so static compiling with commercial software gets the thumbs up!).

The latest changes include:

• A server-side prepared statement API
• Improved binary log API
• An example binary log remote retrieval utility using the binlog API called "drizzle_binlogs"
• A new build system, DDM4 which is used by Gearman and Memcached
• Many bugs fixes

The source and manuals can be found on the Launchpad downloads page.  Please enjoy, feel free to file bugs, questions and hack on code on our Launchpad page.  Happy holidays to all!

Libdrizzle Redux 5.0-alpha1 Released!

Over the past few months I have been spending my spare time on a new project.  A new version of libdrizzle which is much simpler to use and with many new features.  Today the first version of this MySQL compatible client is released, called Libdrizzle Redux.

Why 5.0?  Because Libdrizzle 1.0 and 2.0 have already been released, in packaging versions 3.0 and 4.0 used as API revisions.  So 5.0 is the fresh start.

Main Features

These are the main features of the library:

• A BSD licensed MySQL compatible C connector, so you can statically link it with commercial software
• A simplified API compared to Libdrizzle.  No more confusion over whether the client or library should be allocating/freeing.  There isn't a big difference to the MySQL C API for most things.
• New documentation, PDF for now web based coming soon.
• A new binlog reading API.  This can connect as a MySQL slave or mysqlbinlog client and get each event from the binary log.

Differences from Libdrizzle

Whilst based on Libdrizzle, Libdrizzle Redux has had an overhaul:

• The API is a little different from the older Libdrizzle library, for the most part it has been simplified
• The server-side API has been stripped out, this is now a client-only connector
• The new Binlog API
• Improved documentation

Still to Come

These is still a lot of work to do.  There are several features I want to get in over the next 6 months and improve the features we already have.  Some example of the improvements needed are:

• Improvements to documentation with better examples and a breakdown of the explanation of the examples and how they work
• More tests!  Testing against more platforms too
• A different build system.  I used CMake for now for RAD purposes, Brian Aker is already working on switching this out for an autotools based system.
• Server-side prepared statement support
• Several new client projects using this library

This is a fully open source project, so anyone can come along and hack on it.

Download

You can download it now from Launchpad along with the documentation.  The download page is here.

Slides for Connectors Talk

I could not find a way to upload my slides for today's talk entitled "MySQL Compatible Open Source Connectors" on the Percona Live website so the PDF can be viewed on Slideshare.  Enjoy!

Openstack - Coding at Scale Keynote

This morning I gave a short keynote at O'Reilly's Velocity Europe entitled 'Openstack - Coding at Scale'

See the video below.

A Change in Direction

In 2008 my career took a sudden unexpected turn into the world of MySQL when I was offered a job at Sun.  Since then MySQL and it's forks have been a big part of my life.  The whole community (I mean the people, not the companies) around MySQL are part of what really drove me.

Unfortunately to me something has changed.  I am not exactly sure what it is, but I am sure it is not just me because others have expressed it in conversation too.  I wasn't enjoying things as much as I used to and for several reasons, some related to this, I have been quite ill.

Recently I was approached by HP's new cloud division who wanted me to work on OpenStack.  It seemed the perfect opportunity to start something new inside a new vibrant community.  That is not to say I have anything against my previous employer, SkySQL.  They are doing a fantastic job with a great vision and I wish them well in the future.

So, I have been working on OpenStack's Core Infrastructure team for a week and a half now and so far I am loving it.  The community is very welcoming and it is refreshing to see a development model similar to the one used in Drizzle so widely adopted.  I look forward to diving deeper into the OpenStack world and blogging about it as I go.

Mydumper now with MyISAM consistent snapshots!

Mydumper 0.2.2 has been released today with a number of fixes and new features.  The one that most people have been asking for is consistent snapshots for non-InnoDB tables (such as MyISAM).  We have been able to achieve this without locking the database for the entire backup using the following method:

1. Flush tables with read lock (and start transaction with consistent snapshot on all threads)


2. Dump non-InnoDB


3. Start InnoDB dump


4. When non-InnoDB dump has finished (whilst InnoDB is dumping) unlock tables


5. ...


6. Profit

I have also started work on Drizzle support this week.  The Drizzle support is not entirely complete mostly down to Drizzle's handling of SHOW TABLE STATUS and I expect to have it fully working next week.

Here is the list of changes since 0.2.1:

• Consistent snapshots for non-InnoDB (non-transactional) tables


• Fix --binlogs breaking consistent snapshots


• (very) Minor performance improvement to mydumper


• Initial support for Drizzle


• Add --verbose option


• Fix multiple ';' at end of file


• Fix myloader not closing files


• Improve myloader error messages


• Several fixes to documentation building


• Make myloader tell mysqld to not binlog imports by default (new option --enable-binlog to log them)


• Add --database to myloader for single database import to a different database


• Change mydumper's --schemas to --no-schemas (--schemas is now default)


• Add verbose messages (with --verbose=3)


• Fix memory leaks in myloader

You can download mydumper 0.2.2 from Launchpad or by clicking here.

Many thanks to everyone who has been testing mydumper and giving feedback.  Your comments and suggestions go a long way to improving mydumper.

Viewing the MySQL dump import progress

A couple of years ago I wrote a patch for the MySQL command line client which shows the progress of a import as it happens (I also created a similar patch for mysqldump which later made it into Drizzle).  I don't have the blog archives from back then but Harrison Fisk commented suggesting I use a utility called 'bar' instead.

The 'bar' utility actually is a lot better than the patch I wrote and I highly recommend it when you are importing a large dump file.  To use it simply run:

shell> bar -if=data.sql | mysql

This will generate an output such as:



If you are using Ubuntu then it is a simple case of 'sudo apt-get install bar' to install it.  Enjoy!

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.

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.

Using Wordpress 3.1 on Drizzle

Since the GA release of Drizzle7 I've had several people asking me about how to convert their MySQL sites to use Drizzle instead.  By far the most common one to crop-up is Wordpress.  This is aimed to be a simple guide to starting a new blog using Wordpress 3.1 and Drizzle.

Initial Problems

Wordpress by design is very MySQL orientated, for the most part this is good thing, but when trying to switch to another database for it there can be complications.  An attempt has been made to create a plugin to use Drizzle, but unfortunately it has side-effects such as modifying your content if you happen to blog about anything related to MySQL or Drizzle.  For the purposes of this blog post I have create a patch and will give instructions on how to use it below.  If any Wordpress guru has a way to make this into a good plugin, please get in touch!

Conversions Needed

Almost all the conversions for Wordpress 3.1 revolve around the date.  When creating a draft or any other table entry Wordpress uses the date '0000-00-00' in several columns.  In Drizzle we try to be closer to the SQL standards, and this means that the first valid date is '0001-01-01'.  A large majority of the patch is this particular conversion for the queries throughout the PHP code.  The rest is to do with schema creation, to be specific:

1. Drizzle has no LONGTEXT, TINYTEXT, etc...  Just TEXT


2. Drizzle doesn't support multiple character sets, just UTF-8, so we need to drop the character set part of schema creation

The Patch

To patch your wordpress 3.1 source:

1. Download the patch


2. Enter the directory of your wordpress installation


3. Run the following

patch -p1 < wordpress-drizzle.diff

You should now be good to run the install as normal.  Noting that if you are not using the mysql-unix-socket-protocol plugin that you should tell Wordpress to connect to '127.0.0.1' for a local database instead of 'localhost'.

Converting an Installtion

If you already have Wordpress 3.1 installed and using MySQL the patch combined with drizzledump's migration function should still work but I have not tried this, so please backup first before attempting it.

Last Week in Drizzle

Welcome to the latest edition of Last Week in Drizzle.  This week we announced our GA release!!  Interest in Drizzle in the last week has been much higher than anticipated, this blog alone got 4,500 visitors on Wednesday! (which was also a nice test for the Drizzle database powering it)

GA Release

So, on Tuesday the tarball was cut for our GA release called Drizzle7.  Most of the changes from the last week relate to code cleanup, documentation and test suite improvements so that we could keep the codebase stable ready for the release (also many of us are busy writing conference talks around now :) ).  For a quick summary of what to expect in Drizzle7 and the future you can see my three-part special called "Drizzle - The Icing on the Cake": part 1 part 2 part 3

There have also been blog posts from several members of the Drizzle team: Brian Aker, Patrick Crews, Stewart Smith and more can be found on Planet Drizzle

Drizzle in the Media

We have had huge coverage by many technology publications which has been fantastic to read, I'll try to link to some of them here but you should be able to find more by searching Google News:

• The H: Cloud and web database Drizzle reaches general availability


• The Register: Drizzle: Big-Data-happy MySQL fork debuts (some technical inaccuracies in this, HailDB isn't the default engine, InnoDB is, but still great to see The Register covering us)


• InternetNews.com: Open Source Drizzle database now GA - Should Oracle worry?


• InfoWorld: Non-Oracle MySQL fork deemed ready for prime time


• NetworkWorld: Is the 'database for the cloud' ready? Drizzle GA released


• ZDNet: MySQL fork Drizzle gets general release


• Rackspace Cloud Blog: Drizzle7: The First GA release of the Drizzle Project (OK, I wrote that one ;) )

There has also been a lot of coverage in foreign media which is also fantastic to see.

Drizzle Downloads

The only metric we have for the amount of downloads for Drizzle is the source downloads.  We can't record the usage of the Ubuntu PPA or the installations using the pre-release of Ubuntu Natty (which has Drizzle in it's repositories) and currently don't log the RPM yum repository.  But on source downloads alone there were more downloads in the first 2 days of GA than the 2 weeks of the RC2 release (I count a shade under 400 downloads at the time of publishing this).  On top of this many more people have come to the #drizzle IRC channel on Freenode to ask us questions and even one or two minor bugs have already been found by new users.

Criticisms

The biggest criticism I have seen so far is the name 'Drizzle' for a database.  I personally like the name 'Drizzle', but I come from the UK where Drizzle is a very regular weather condition.  I actually think that is a really good thing, if the only big complaint is the name we most be going right somewhere :)

Fremont

Development has already started on the next version of Drizzle codename Fremont (Drizzle7's codename was Elliott).  This time we aim to make you wait a little less time, with the next GA scheduled for later this year.  For those who haven't guessed it already the codenames for Drizzle are based on road names in Seattle (another place where drizzle regularly happens).  It hasn't yet been decided whether this will be Drizzle7.1 or Drizzle8 and I'm sure we would take suggestions on this at the upcoming Drizzle Developer Day.

Final Thoughts

The overall feedback from the last week has been fantastic.  I'd like to thank everyone who has given us great coverage, everyone who has tried Drizzle and last but not least everyone who develops Drizzle whether it be at Rackspace, another company or just a community developer.

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