I have a friend who is fond of telling a story from way back in November 2008 at the OpenSQL camp in Charlottesville, Virgina. This was relatively shortly after we had announced to the public that we’d started something called Drizzle (we did that at OSCON) and was even closer to the date I started working on Drizzle full time (which was November 1st). Compared to what it is now, the Drizzle code base was in its infancy. One of the things we hadn’t yet sorted out was the rewrite of the replication code.

So, I had my laptop plugged into a projector, and somebody suggested opening up some random source file… so I did. It was a bit of the replication code that we’d inherited from MySQL.

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A few weeks ago I blogged about the HTTP JSON api in Drizzle. (See also a small demo app using it.) In this post I want to elaborate a little on the design decisions taken. (One reason to do this is to provide a foundation for future work, especially in the form of a GSoC project.)

Looking around: MongoDB, CouchDB, Metabase

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This is the second and final part of my notes from the MySQL conference. In this part I'll focus on the technical substance of talks I saw, and didn't see.

More than ever before I was a contributor rather than attendee at this conference. Looking back, this resulted in seeing less talks than I would have wanted to, since I was speaking or preparing to speak myself. Sometimes it was worse than speaking, for instance I spent half a day picking up pewter goblets from an egnravings shop... (congratulations to all the winners again :-) Luckily, I can make up for some of that by going back and browse their slides. This is especially important whenever 2 good talks are scheduled in the same slot, or in the same slot when I was to speak. So I have categorized topics here along various axes, but also along the "things I did see" versus "things I missed"

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I have finally recovered from my trip to Santa Clara enough that I can scribble down some notes from this year's MySQL Conference. Writing a travel report is part of the deal where my employer covers the travel expense, so even if many people have written about the conference, I need to do it too. And judging from the many posts for instance from Pythian's direction, Nokia is perhaps not the only company with such a policy?

Baron's keynote

There has usually always been something that can be called a "soft keynote". Pirate Party founder Rick Falckvinge speaking at a database conference is a memorable example (I still keep in touch with him, having met him at the Hyatt Santa Clara). This year there was one less day, and therefore less keynotes. The soft keynote was therefore taken care of by Baron using some time out of Peter's opening keynote.

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Since the famous conjecture by Eric Brewer and proof by Nancy Lynch et al., CAP has given the world countless learned discussions about distributed systems and many a well-funded start-up.  Yet who truly understands what CAP means?  Even a cursory survey of the blogosphere shows profound disagreement about the meaning of terms like CP, AP, and CA in real systems.  Those who disagree on CAP include some of the most illustrious personages of the database community.

We can therefore state with some confidence that CAP is confusing. Yet this observation itself raises deeper questions.  Is CAP merely confusing?  Or is it the case that as with other initially accepted but

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I decided to take a look at Drizzle today and was encouraged by what I saw. Here’s my favorite part:

There is no UNSIGNED (as per the standard). * There are no spatial data types GEOMETRY, POINT, LINESTRING & POLYGON (go use Postgres). * No YEAR field type. * There are no FULLTEXT indexes for the MyISAM storage engine (the only engine FULLTEXT was supported in). Look at either Lucene, Sphinx, or Solr. * No “dual” table. * The “LOCAL” keyword in “LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE” is not supported

GO USE POSTGRES. Awesome.

List of differences from MySQL.

So yesterday I introduced the newly committed HTTP JSON key-value interface in Drizzle. The next step of course is to create some simple application that would use this to store data, this serves both as an example use case as well as for myself to get the feeling for whether this makes sense as a programming paradigm.

Personally, I have been a fan of the schemaless key-value approach ever since I graduated university and started doing projects with dozens of tables and hundreds of columns in total. Especially in small projects I always found the array structures in languages like PHP and Perl and Python to be very flexible to develop with. As I was developing and realized I need a new variable or new data field somewhere, it was straightforward to just toss a new

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Oh boy, I'm starting to feel the stress of having to prepare a little bit of this and a little bit of that for the upcoming MySQL User Conference (Santa Clara, April 10 to 13). But I wanted to also jump on this meme and list a few sessions I definitively want to attend:

I'm speaking, so I suppose I need to attend:

• How to evaluate which MySQL High Availability solution best suits you. This 3 hour tutorial I'm co-presenting with Ben Mildren, a former Nokia collague who now works with Pythian.

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Earlier today I posted a Drizzle white paper we've been working on: Drizzle and IPv6.

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A week ago I again had the pleasure to give a guest lecture at Tampere University of Technology. I've visited them the first time when I worked as MySQL pre-sales in Sun.

To be trendy, I of course had to talk about the cloud. It turns out every section has the subtitle "...and why it is more difficult for databases". I also rightfully claim to have invented the NoSQL key-value development model in 2005.

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Today I'm coming out of the closet. Since I'm a professional database expert I try to be like the mainstream and use the commercial MySQL forks (including MySQL itself). But I think those close to me have already known for some time that I like community based open source projects. I cannot deny it any longer, so let me just say it: I'm a Drizzle contributor and I'm very much engaged!

I've been eyeing the Drizzle project since it started in 2008. Already then there were dozens of MySQL hackers for which this project was a refuge they instantly flocked to. Finally a real open source project based on MySQL code that they could contribute to, and they did. It was like a breath of fresh air in a culture that previously had only accepted one kind of relationships: that between an employer and an employee. Drizzle was more liberal. It accepted also forms of engagement already common in most other

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Good news to all of you who are going or were thinking of going to the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo. Yesterday two great addon events were announced, both happening on Friday April 13th, right after the main conference:

Drizzle Day 2012

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Henrik has already posted it over on the Drizzle Blog, but I thought I’d give a shout out here too.

We’re holding a Drizzle Day right after the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo in April. So, since you’re all like me and don’t book your travel this far in advance, it’ll be easy to stay for the extra day and come and learn awesome things about Drizzle.

I’m also pretty glad that my employer, Percona is sponsoring the event.

Usually people do this around New Year, I will do it in February. Actually, I was inspired to do this after reviewing all the talks for this year's MySQL Conference - what a snapshot into the state of where we are! It made me realize we've made important progress in the past year, worth taking a moment to celebrate it. So here we go...

Diversification

In the past few years there was a lot of fear and doubt about MySQL due to Oracle taking over the ownership. But if you ask me, I was more worried for MySQL because of MySQL itself. I've often said that if MySQL had been a healthy open source project - like the other 3 components in the LAMP stack - then most of the NoSQL technologies we've seen come about would never have been started as their own projects, because it would have

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Selena and I gave a talk on the various issues of running databases “in the cloud” at the recent linux.conf.au in Ballarat. Video is up, embedded below:

In my previous post I explained why I believe the production of RPM and DEB packages should be more integrated with the rest of your development process. Now it's time to look into how you can put the RPM build scripts inside your main source code repository, and in particular how I did that to produce RPM packages for Drizzle.

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Last weekend I released rpm files for the latest Drizzle Fremont beta (announcement). As part of that work I've also integrated the spec file and other files used by the rpmbuild into the main Drizzle bzr repository (but not yet merged into trunk). In this post I want to explain why I think this is a good thing, and in a follow up post I'll go into what I needed to do to make it work.

(And speaking of stuff you can download, phpMyAdmin 3.5.0-alpha1 now supports Drizzle!)

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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



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First of all, I wish you a happy new year.
Many things happened last year, it was really exciting to be involved in the MySQL ecosystem.
I hope this enthusiasm will be increased this year, up to you !

To start the year, I propose the MySQL[plus] Awards 2011
It will only take 5 minutes to fill out these polls.
Answer with your heart first and then with your experience with some of these tools or services.

Polls will be closed January 31, so, vote now !
For “other” answers, please,  let me a comment with details.

Don’t hesitate to submit proposal for tools or services in the comments.

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One of the best things that can happen to a piece of software is for people to actually use it.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have received feedback on the tool from several members of both the Percona and Drizzle teams.  The most common and strongly emphasized comments were in regards to what a terrible, terrible name dbqp really is in terms of saying, seeing, and typing it ; )

As that isn’t something that can be disputed (it’s really annoying to use in conversations *and* to type several dozen times a day), the project has been renamed to kewpie.  For those that follow such things, I did present on

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A year ago I posted a blog on The state of MySQL forks: co-operating without co-operating. (Also Giuseppe wrote about the topic at that time, and Peter Zaitsev covers it in his conference keynotes.) So I've been wondering if it would be good to write an update on the topic now, and in that case what to write.

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There's now 2 weeks left of the Call for Papers for Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo (Santa Clara, CA). This weekend I've been finalizing my abstracts for submission and I trust many of you are doing the same. (If nothing else, do it for the free entrance! Or because you're passionate about MySQL, yeah, that's what I meant...)

This is the main annual MySQL event, so I thought it is worth the bandwidth to use these two weeks for some discussion and brainstorming. We are the MySQL community, it's up to us to make this a great conference now! This year I'm on the program committee, so I'm looking forward to reviewing many, many great proposals. At the same time, I'm interested to hear what you, dear readers - and hopefully future conference visitors - are interested in seeing at the conference? I'll

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So I’m back from the Percona dev team’s recent meeting.  While there, we spent a fair bit of time discussing Xtrabackup development.  One of our challenges is that as we add richer features to the tool, we need equivalent testing capabilities.  However, it seems a constant in the MySQL world that available QA tools often leave something to be desired.  The randgen is a literal wonder-tool for database testing, but it is also occasionally frustrating / doesn’t scratch every testing itch.  It is based on technology SQL Server was using in 1998 (MySQL began using it in ~2007, IIRC).  So this is no knock, it is merely meant to be an example of a poor QA engineer’s frustrations ; )  While the current

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Here are the slides to my second talk at last week's Percona Live event in London:

Fixed in drizzle
View more presentations from Henrik Ingo

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In a previous post about different output for the same query there were 3 databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite) and 3 different results.

I attended the "Fixed in Drizzle: No more GOTCHA's" talk during Percona Live London. The talk was full of issues which I've encountered many times and which were all fixed. So I wondered whether or not this is already fixed in Drizzle.

Here is the results for Drizzle:

drizzle> select version();
+------------+
| version()  |
+------------+
| 2011.03.13 | 
+------------+
1 row in set (0.000418 sec)

drizzle> create database test;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.000622 sec)

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Suomeksi: MySQL käyttäjätapaaminen Helsingissä 1. marraskuuta. Klikkaa allaolevaa linkkiä ilmoittautuaksesi, siellä saat myös lisätietoa suomeksi.

Finally it's here! So many of you have always asked about it. Markus and other Elisa guys. Osma and Ilkka at Habbo Hotel. And others... MySQL was born in Helsinki, InnoDB was born in Helsinki, a lesser known database / also MySQL engine called Solid was born in Helsinki, and 2 great replication companies, Continuent with multiple generations of clustering for MySQL, and Codership with Galera, are Helsinki companies. And amidst this embarrassment of riches, what did we not have?

A MySQL User Group.

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