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



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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

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My last but not least GSoC idea. This is about actual tool that already exists but is currently a little bit broken and needs rewrite with a bigger picture in mind.

What is fillup?

As this project is named fillup-ng, it is obviously supposed to be replacement for existing utility called fillup. Let’s talk a little bit about what fillup currently does. It is used to parse sysconfig files. These files has syntax similar to shell scripts with only variables definitions. The difference is that comments in these scripts has their meaning. And fillup is used to merge them automatically somehow. Basic operation are following. You’ve got some configuration file on your system and new version cames in from

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This post is about one idea for GSoC 2011 regarding openSUSE Connect. I already wrote about it some time ago, but now is time to elaborate a little bit more.

First of all, let me state, that I already found a qualified student, that wants to work on this idea and that has also some good suggestions. So I’m not searching for a student with this post, but I want to share with you the goals of this project and why I think it is important.

Let’s start again with what it is all about. We as a openSUSE Project have many contributors. People provide not only code, but they write

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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

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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

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Another of GSoC ideas that I volunteered to mentor for our GSoC was adding support for BitBake to the openSUSE Build Service. In this post I want to talk about why do I think that BitBake support for openSUSE Build Service will be useful and why do I think that OpenEmbedded is actually pretty cool.

What is BitBake? Why is OpenEmbedded cool?

BitBake is a build system used mainly by OpenEmbedded. In a way it is kind of similar to what openSUSE does for us. It takes one sources and makes it possible to build them for many distributions. There are some

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Last week I started introducing my GSoC ideas. This is continuation of that post series. Today I’ll be writing about OpenID provider plugin for Elgg, what is it good for and why we need it.

What is Elgg and why should you care?

Elgg is a soacial networking platform. It is written in PHP and it has quite general design. It supports plugins that can change nearly anything. It also has quite vivid community around. Community that among other things provides lots of plugins. And it is of course open source. All these features were reasons why we chose Elgg as a

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You must already heard about this from everybody. Google Summer of Code 2011 is nearby and openSUSE wants to participate. Currently we are collecting ideas and mentors and we are going to apply. I also came up with few projects and volunteered to mentor them. I saw Thomas Thym introducing his GSoC ideas and I think it’s great to write a blog posts that introduce projects. So I’ll join and here comes the first project that many of you were waiting for – SaX 3.

SaX 3

I guess I don’t have to explain what was SaX 2 good for. It is one of the most voted features in openFATE – bring SaX back to live. SaX 2 was the tool to configure X server.

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We had 12 projects, and by the time we’ve hit mid-terms, we’ve decided to cull 2 project so far, leaving us with 10 projects.

This year, the MySQL project can really divide itself into three groups – those hacking on MySQL, Drizzle, or phpMyAdmin. Next year, will we see others? I certainly hope so…

Drizzle – Padraig O’Sullivan is doing an excellent job at working on a new implementation of the INFORMATION_SCHEMA. Nathan Williams is doing great work at code cleanup for Drizzle, and making it conform to C++ standards. Jiangfeng Peng is hacking on batch nested loop join’s in Drizzle.

phpMyAdmin – Derek Schaefer is adding import improvements to phpMyAdmin, while Tomas Srnka is working on adding MySQL Replication support for phpMyAdmin (and impressing his mentor!). Zahra Naeem is working

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You know, amongst all the announcements this week, I should also mention that MySQL has been accepted into the Google Summer of Code 2009, and all our students are ready to rock and roll. Its the community bonding period now, and we have a bunch more mentors that will participate, its very exciting. Check out the student list for MySQL. Yes, lots of phpMyAdmin and Drizzle stuff too. They’re all part of the extended community, no?

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I was a little worried last week with regards to our Google Summer of Code status, but I’m glad to see that MySQL has been accepted, for a third year running, for the Google Summer of Code 2009.

Mentors & students alike, check out the ideas page. You as a student can even submit ideas, and we’ll look for a mentor for you, naturally.

Things we’re looking for:

• Simple bug fixes
• Improvements in documentation of code
• Test suite improvements
• New features, but simple

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After checking with the relevant parties, MySQL has just submitted an application for the Google Summer of Code 2009. We’ve successfully participated in SoC during 2007, and 2008, and we’re hoping to get another shot at SoC, for our third year running.

What is Summer of Code? It means different things to many different people. If you’re a student, it means you get to hack on MySQL and the related products, and churn out code, that over eleven million people use, while you sit on the beach in your bathers! And when successful, you get a nice wad of cash even!

If you’re a mentor, it

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Whether an online comic, or not, the New Straits Times is one of the three English dailies, that still cost some amount of money in Malaysia. Their Computimes pullout, now better known as Tech&U, featured Raj Kissu, a Summer of Code 2008 participant for MySQL. While the article itself, fails to mention MySQL, he describes what he’s working on:

I?m doing a project on binary large objects in database. Basically, it is aimed at allowing people to file or stream files online. The program is based on open source.

Kudos to Raj, kudos to Google, kudos to phpMyAdmin, and kudos to MySQL. As for the reporter, as usual, old medium journalism tends to be somewhat of a fail….

This column obfuscation scheme is designed so that information can be gathered about the query and underlying schema, by just looking at the query. You will be able to tell if it is using keys correctly just by looking at the column names in the query.

Column Name Obfuscation 

Table Prefix Columns of a table will be prefixed with a abbreviation or (from a list of random names that can be selected from a list following a theme or something) of the Obfuscated table name (when I tackle joins this will resolve and conflict in names that are going to occur)

Column Type, undecided on whether or not to just go with simplified names like (str|int|float|bin) or go with the full data type (i.e BININT,BLOB,DECIMAL,VARCHAR,TEXT…).

Keys, P[0-9] numbers are only for multi value PRIMARY

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I'll be using this blog to keep the community and anyone interested in updates on my Google Summer of Code Project.The initial ideas for the project are available here MySQL Obfuscator. 
I'll developing it for PHP >= 5.1. The simplified working of it will be that it takes query's and a DB connection, gathers information about schema and rewrites the query and DDL for related tables.

I've got some ideas about the Schema renaming scheme that i will post here in the next day or two, I would like to get some feed back on the scheme, so feel free to poke holes in my ideas early. I would also like to hear any other input.

MySQL is featured on the Google Open Source Blog
Just after leaving JavaOne, Leslie pinged me on IRC to inform me that the MySQL project was featured on the Google Open Source blog. Go on, read Moments of Inspiration.

In other news from mentors, Colin Charles, former mentor and 2008 organization administrator for MySQL (http://www.mysql.com/) dropped a note to let us know that their Community Bonding period is moving along swimmingly. So well, in fact, that their students are already delivering weekly status reports. Colin mentioned that

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