To round off my memoirs from the MySQL conference 2011, I'll just write down for the historical record my own activities.

MySQL awards

With the community picking up tasks that used to be handled by MySQL AB, it somehow has fallen on my lap to drive the selection of winners for the annual MySQL awards. This was the second year we did it and we have settled on a format where the winners are chosen by a community panel consisting of 2 previous years winners, plus the conference chair(s). I think having the community nominating and voting the winners have brought forward some truly deserving and sometimes also surprising winners, and it has been a pleasure to be involved in this process. I feel privileged to be part of a process channeling so much goodwill and respect from the MySQL community to the winners.

This year's winners were

Friendly and without drama

That's a good way to summarize the MySQL conference 2011. Nobody acquired nobody. There were no volcanoes keeping men away from their wives, dads away from soon to be born babies. I had packed extra underwear just in case, but it wasn't needed.

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So while I was at the MySQL UC, The Xeround database came to my attention.  It bills itself as database as a service for MySQL systems and a seamless replacement for standard MySQL.

Of course, since I am a QA Engineer, I could not resist the urge to try to break it >:)  As my friend and former MySQL colleage, Kostja says, “QA Engineers are a unique breed…they like to push all the buttons” : )  I would say that the QA mindset goes a bit further than that, but it is something I will delve into in another post.  I will only say that there is a reason that Microsoft recognizes QA software engineering as a distinct and specialized discipline.

So, let’s get back to Xeround.  It was the first database as a service that caught my eye and I just had to test it!  They are currently offering a

Rackspace and Drizzle

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

So… I had another one of those “hrrm… this shouldn’t be hard to hack a proof-of-concept” moments. Web apps are increasingly speaking JSON all around the place. Why can’t we speak JSON to/from the database? Why? Seriously, why not?

One reason why MongoDB has found users is that JSON is very familiar to people. It has gained popularity in spite of having pure disregard for the integrity and safety of your data.

So I started with a really simple idea: http server in the database server. Thanks to the simple code to do that with libevent, I got that going fairly quickly. Finding a rather nice C++ library to create and parse JSON was the next challenge. I found JSONcpp, a public domain library with a nice API and proceeded to bring it into the tree (it’s not

O'Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo

Drizzle Developer Day

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

 (or at least some ideas)

I really enjoyed David Shrewsbury's presentation about Drizzle replication today at the MySQL conf 2011. It's not that Drizzle replication is fully fleshed out, but it sure seems like it's got all the necessary components to make it dramatically better than stock MySQL replication, at least from the HA perspective.

Here's some things that Drizzle replication (or MySQL replication, for that matter) needs for me to be able to improve on the Master HA technique that is used at Yahoo:

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This morning at the MySQL User Conference and Expo, we’re excited to be included in Brian Aker’s keynote “The State of Drizzle” as one of the first organization to offer support for Drizzle now that it has reached GA with the release of Drizzle 7.  Brian Aker is the CTO of Data Differential and is the lead developer for the Drizzle Project.

Blue Gecko will offer operational support via our remote DBA model for Drizzle environments in the same manner and with the same stellar support team as has grown to support MySQL since we added service for it in 2003.  Our team can augment a company’s operational DBAs or can help a small installation move from a developer managed database to a more scalable 24×7 follow the sun operational model.  We provide operational remote DBA

I’m giving two talks tomorrow (Tuesday) at the MySQL Conference and Expo:

HailDB: A NoSQL API direct to InnoDB, 2:00pm, Ballroom D

Dropping ACID: Eating Data In A Web 2.0 Cloud World 3:05pm, Ballroom G

The HailDB talk is all about a C API to embed an InnoDB based relational database engine into your application. Awesome stuff (also nice and technical).

The second talk, “Dropping ACID: Eating Data in a Web 2.0 Cloud World” is not only a joke that only database people get, but a humorous and serious look at data integrity and reliability as promised by the current hype. This was quite well received at linux.conf.au in January. So, if you weren’t in Australia in January this year, then certainly come along and see how you go heckling an Australian.

Rackspace has been busy over the last year, funding both the Drizzle project and the OpenStack project. I've been lucky enough to be involved in both, and I couldn't be more pleased and proud of the stuff that's come from both projects.

What about synergy though?

Well, it turns out that it's pretty easy to use Drizzle as your database for two of the three current main OpenStack components. Glance, the Image Registry and  Nova the Cloud Computing Fabric Controller, both use SQLAlchemy to manage data that needs to go into a database.

There's one prerequisite you need to get up and running, and that's SQLAlchemy 7, which is currently in beta. SQLAlchemy 7 introduces a Drizzle dialect, which tells the ORM how to map properly to Drizzle datatypes and the like. Once you've installed SA7, it's as simple as creating a schema to stick data in and the changing the

Drizzle in Real Time Data Visualization

Percona's Contributions

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

I’m pleased to announce the release of the Narada Search Engine Application, version 0.202, as well as a ready-to-use AMI, ami-140df07d.

The source release can be found at Launchpad – lp:narada and and a packaged version at http://patg.net/downloads/narada-0.202.tar.gz

What is Narada? Narada is a search engine application. It does have a web application component, but it also has a very novel approach on the back-end in how it implements various functionalities by using Gearman, memcached, Sphinx and either MySQL or Drizzle as a data store. It is somewhat of a proof-of-concept that was borne from an idea I had one late night while working on my first book,

First Fremont Tarball

Xtrabackup

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

With this revision, My xtrabackup branch has been merged into trunk.

What does this mean? It means that we now get a drizzlebackup.innobase binary which is the xtrabackup port for Drizzle. Exciting times.

As Lee mentioned on the Drizzle blog, we have an upcoming Drizzle Developer Day just after the MySQL Conference and Expo. Sign up here to make sure we have enough space and can help with planning.

The last couple developer days have been great – helping people getting started with Drizzle, discussing improvements that could be made (both big and small), operations concerns and new to this one: a GA release.

Having a GA release out is really exciting, I’m hoping that on the developer day we get people coming

Follow it over on launchpad.

After having fixed an incredibly odd compiler warning (and with -Werror that we build with, error) on OSX (die die die) – xtrabackup for Drizzle is ready to be merged. This will bring it into our next milestone: freemont. Over the next few weeks you should see some good tests merged in for backup and restore too.

While not final final, I’m thinking that the installed binary name will be drizzlebackup.innobase. A simple naming scheme for various backup tools that are Drizzle specific. This casually pre-empts a drizzlebackup tool that can co-ordinate all of these (like the innobackupex script).

Fremont

Google Summer of Code

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

This is just a friendly reminder that you can nominate your favorite MySQL community member, application and company for the traditional awards. The nominations must be in by the end of this week, after which the panel votes on them:

http://openlife.cc/blogs/2011/march/call-nominations-2011-oreilly-mysql-...

I've seen at least a few people on IRC that were thinking of sending in nominations, now is a good time to do it!

The address is mysql.awards@gmail.com

For backups, historically in the MySQL world you’ve had mysqldump (a SQL dump, means on restore you have to rebuild indexes), InnoDB Hot Backup (proprietary, but takes a copy of the InnoDB data files, so restore is much quicker), LVM snapshots (various scripts exist, does have larger IO impact, requires LVM) and more recently xtrabackup. Xtrabackup essentially does the same thing as InnoDB hot backup except that it’s free and open source software.

Many people have been using xtrabackup successfully for quite a while now.

In Drizzle7, our default storage engine is InnoDB. There have been a few changes, but it is totally InnoDB. This leaves us with the question of backup solutions. We have drizzledump (the Drizzle equivalent to MySQL dump – although with fewer gotchas), you could always use LVM snapshots and the probability of Oracle