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.

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 the third edition of Last Week in Drizzle.  The diff of the trunk between last Friday and right now is just over 230,000 lines in size, 10x the size of the previous week!  This includes many changes to the documentation, code clean-ups and Patrick Crews' continued work on our new DBQP test suite.

Replication

David Shrewsbury (I'm going to spell his name correctly this week ;)) and Patrick Crews have been working hard on making replication even more rock solid.  The slave plugin is in, working and is stable with everything we can throw at it.

Drizzle developer day

We have a Drizzle Developer Day at the 2011 O'Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo.  Anyone is welcome to come and learn, contribute and make suggestions about Drizzle.  It will be on Friday 15th April 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. although the exact location is to be confirmed it will likely take place in the Santa Clara Convention Centre.

If you wish to come along please sign-up here.

Race to GA

Our RC2 was released on the 28th of February and included the stabilised replication code amongst other fixes.  So the release schedule for Drizzle7 is:

RC1 – 14th February 2011 Released
RC2 – 28th February 2011 Released
GA – 14th March 2011

SQLAlchemy

Monty Taylor has been working hard to get Drizzle working with SQLAlchemy which has a very rigorous test suite.  This will help make it easier for Drizzle to act as a data store for OpenStack Compute which uses SQLAlchemy.

Libdrizzle

We have noticed that people have been downloading libdrizzle from the old libdrizzle Launchpad page.  Back in October we merged libdrizzle into the main Drizzle trunk and since then all bug fixes/development has happened there.  We highly recommend not using the old libdrizzle (which has known bugs) and we are in the process of shutting down the old libdrizzle development page.

Drizzle module for PHP

We have started developing the Drizzle module for PHP in Launchpad and have created a new release of this which is compatible with the libdrizzle in the Drizzle trunk.  We are working to get the fixes in PECL but in the mean time we will be developing in Launchpad and basing any binary releases from this.

Of course, Drizzle is compatible with the MySQL protocol so the existing MySQL functions and classes will work with Drizzle.

Drizzle module for Perl

Patrick Galbraith has released version 0.303 of DBD::Drizzle which contains several fixes for talking to a Drizzle server.

Final Thoughts

We are pretty much at the homestretch for the first GA, years of work from a huge amount of contributors will have a stable release.  Thanks to the many people who have helped make this happen.  We receive valuable feedback every day and all of it goes to make Drizzle a better product.

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