Peter and Arjen will be at DrupalCon SF 2010. Peter specifically for the event, Arjen staying around the SF area after the MySQL Conference last week.

Specifically, we’ll be talking with people about using the OQGRAPH engine to help with social graphs and other similar problems, easily inside Drupal. You may recall that Peter already created the friendlist_graph extension for the friendlist Drupal module.

From the MySQL Conf and other earlier feedback, OQGRAPH is proving to be a real enabler. And since it’s free/GPLv2 and integrated in MariaDB 5.2, there’s generally no hindrance in starting to use it.

Walter and I are giving a tutorial on Monday morning, MySQL (and MariaDB) Dual Master Setups with MMM, I believe there are still some seats available – tutorials are a bit extra when you register for the conference, so you do need to sign up if you want to be there! It’s a hands-on tutorial/workshop, we’ll be setting up multiple clusters with dual master and the whole rest of the MMM fun, using VMs on your laptops and a separate wired network. Nothing beats messing with something live, breaking it, and seeing what happens!

Then on Tuesday afternoon (5:15pm, Ballroom F), Antony and I will do a session on the 

At DrupalSouth 2010 (Wellington) after LCA2010, Peter and I implemented a Drupal module as a practical example of how the OQGRAPH engine can be used to enable social networking trickery in any website. The friendlist_graph module (available from GitHub) extends friendlist, which implements basic functionality of friends (2-way) and fans (1-way) for Drupal users.

The friendlist_graph module transposes the friendlist data using an OQGRAPH table, allowing you to query it in new and interesting ways. By adding some extra Drupal

Antony is travelling up to Portland for this great event that’s about to start Fri evening and going over the weekend. He’ll be showing other devs and people more about the OQGRAPH engine, and gathering useful feedback.

Open Query is, together with many others (I see Giuseppe, Facebook, Gear6, Google, Infobright, Jeremy Cole, PrimeBase Technologies, Percona, Monty Program, and lots more), sponsoring the event so that it’s accessible for everybody – reducing the key factor to getting there rather than having to worry about high conf fees.

Having acquired the world’s biggest jetlag flying to Charlottesville VA for last year’s OpenSQL Camp, I can confirm from personal experience that it’s a great event. While I can’t be there this time, I’m looking forward to hearing all about it!

Antony has done a bit of magic, considerably speeding up inserts. Since the base implementation does not have persistence, insert speed is particularly important. Copying the 2×89,051 edges for the Tree-of-Life example is now near-instant.

The delete bug has been fixed.

There’s a new Maze example in the OQGRAPH trunk on Launchpad, first introduced in my MySQL University session. I created/inserted a maze of 1 million rooms (that comes to about 3 million edges), and OQGRAPH found the shortest path (122330 steps for this particular maze) in abound one second. That’s pretty good, I

It was fun doing the MySQL University session on OQGRAPH yesterday. Now also available: slides (PDF) and audio/video recording (FLV download, if anyone can convert to a more open format, that’d be great).

Only a few weeks after Walter’s session on Multi-Master Replication with MMM and thanks to the great gang at MySQL Docs (my colleagues from long ago!) I’ll be doing a MySQL University session in a few days, about the GRAPH computation engine. From talks/demos I’ve done about it so far, I’ve learnt that people love it but there are lots of interesting questions. After all, it’s a pretty new and in a way exotic thing.

MySQL University uses DimDim, an online presentation service. You’ll see slides, and hear my voice. You can also type questions in a live chat room. We actually even got desktop sharing working so a live demo is possible, we’ll see how that goes on the day (I’ll make sure to

The MySQL 5.0 and MySQL/MariaDB 5.1 source code is now also available through Launchpad. If you were waiting for a version for 5.1 and are ok with building the plugin from source, now you can!

The repo contains a subdir for examples, we’re hoping many people will contribute little snippets and scripts to import and use interesting datasets. To give you a hint, with graph capabilities you are able to deal with RDF data sources. You just need to transform the XML to say CSV, import into a suitable structure, and copy the edge information across to an OQGRAPH table.

Roland Bouman’s tree-of-life (which uses xslt stylesheets) are a good example of that approach, and was the first entry in the examples tree,

At this point we have a 32-bit and a 64-bit Linux binary tarball, should work on most Ubuntu and CentOS and the like (I tested a few). Possibly OSX coming. Not sure on Windows right now.

For further details and download links, see yesterday’s release post.

It’s time to play! A special thanks particularly to Antony Curtis for the excellent smart and actually very speedy coding, and for just being a great guy to work with. If you would like to utilise his ace MySQL knowledge and coding skills, do talk to me!

Right now, we have a source tarball available for you, patching OQGRAPH on top of a MySQL 5.0.86-d9-Sail (OurDelta) source. As you know MySQL 5.0 does not have engine plugins so patching is the only way we can put it in. This OQGRAPH codebase is licensed under GPLv2+.

Even though we’ve successfully built it on several platforms and architectures, since this is the first public release we’d like you to try it first, as we’re sure that there might be problems on some platforms. When we catch and fix those, we can do proper

Antony and I are busy getting the Open Query GRAPH Engine code ready so you all can play with it, but we needed to test with a larger dataset to make sure all was fundamentally well with the system.

We have some intersting suitable dataset sources, but the first we tried in ernest because it was easy to get in (thanks to Roland Bouman for both the idea and providing xslt stylesheets to transform the set), was the Tree of Life which is a hierarchy of 89052 entries showing how biological species on earth are related to eachother.

GRAPH engine operates in a directed fashion, so I inserted the connections both ways resulting in 178102 entries. So, I inserted A->B as well as B->A for each connection. So we now have a real graph, not just a simple tree.

The GRAPH engine allows you to deal with hierarchies and graphs in a purely relational way. So, we can find all children of an item, path from an item to a root node, shortest path between two items, and so on, each with a simple basic query structure using standard SQL grammar.

The engine is implemented as a MySQL/MariaDB 5.1 plugin (we’re working on a 5.0 backport for some clients) and thus runs with an unmodified server.

Demo time! I’ll simplify/strip a little bit here for space reasons, but what’s here is plain cut/paste from a running server, no edits

-- insert a few entries with connections (and multiple paths)
insert into foo (origid, destid) values (1,2), (2,3), (2,4), (4,5), (3,6), (5,6);
-- a regular table to join on to
insert into people values (1,"pearce"),(2,"hunnicut"),(3,"potter"),