I spent some time this weekend fixing up the Gearman MySQL UDFs (user defined functions) and fixed a few bugs in the Gearman Server. You can find links to the new releases on the Gearman website. The UDFs now use Monty Taylor’s pandora-build autoconf files instead of the old fragile autoconf setup that relied on pkgconfig.

If you are attending the MySQL Conference & Expo next week and want to learn more about Gearman, be sure to check out one of the three sessions Giuseppe Maxia and I are giving:

• Getting started with Gearman for MySQL
• …

In this post I’m going to describe how to write an authentication plugin for Drizzle. The plugin I’ll be demonstrating is a simple file-based plugin that takes a file containing a list of ‘username:password’ entries (one per line like a .htpasswd file for Apache). The first step is to setup a proper build environment and create a branch, see the Drizzle wiki page to get going. From here I’ll assume you have Drizzle checked out from bzr and are able to compile it.

Setup a development branch and plugin directory

Change to your shared-repository directory for Drizzle and run (assuming you branched ‘lp:drizzle’ to ‘drizzle’):

shell$ bzr branch drizzle auth-file
Branched 1432 revision(s).
shell$ cd auth-file

Next, we’ll want to create the plugin directory and create …

I’ve decided to jump on the bandwagon and spill my thoughts on “NoSQL” since it’s been such a hot topic lately ([1], [2], [3], [4]). Since I work on the Drizzle project some folks would probably think I take the SQL side of the “debate,” but actually I’m pretty objective about the topic and find value in projects on both sides. Let me explain.

Last November at OpenSQL Camp I assembled a panel to debate “SQL vs NoSQL.” We had …

On an entirely unrelated note to the MySQL protocol discussions happening yesterday, the MySQL protocol is now the default protocol in Drizzle as of Monday’s tarball (3/15). Drizzle supports a limited version of the MySQL protocol, only supporting the subset of commands Drizzle cares about (no server-side prepared statements, replication, or deprecated commands due to SQL query equivalents). Not all MySQL clients have been fully tested with it, but our entire test suite is using it now with the libdrizzle MySQL implementation. The latest release of libdrizzle also includes defaulting to the MySQL protocol and port for Drizzle …

A couple months ago Selena Deckelmann asked if I wanted to co-chair the Open Source Bridge Conference this year, and I was thrilled to say yes! This conference is all volunteer run by some of the most dedicated volunteers I have ever seen, I’m excited to be working with such a fantastic group of people. The conference is also backed by the 501(c)3 non-profit Technocation which is primarily run by Sheeri Cabral who is well known in the MySQL community.

The conference is June 1-4 in Portland, OR, and will be held at the Portland Art Museum. The …

Since I left Sun back in January, folks have been asking what was next. I’m happy to say that I’m going to continue hacking on open source projects like Drizzle and Gearman, but now at the Rackspace Cloud. Not only will I be there, but I get to continue working closely with a few of the amazing Drizzle hackers who have also joined, including Monty Taylor, Jay Pipes, Stewart Smith, and Lee Bieber.

Why Rackspace Cloud? Late last year I was considering what I wanted to do next with the Oracle acquisition looming near, and this was one of the options that …

I’ve developed primarily in C most of my career, and recently decided to give C++ a shot as my “primary language” due to hacking on Drizzle and MySQL. The past few months I’ve read and experimented with most features C++ provides over C, including reading Scott Meyer’s excellent “Effective” series books (highly recommended). Along the way I’ve been developing a project I’ve wanted to write for a while, and I’m finding some features to be problematic. I thought I’d share these issues so others can be aware of them and perhaps I can learn better workarounds.

The project I’ve been working on uses dynamic shared object loading at runtime (using dlopen() and friends), is threaded, and has about every strict compiler warning on you can find and being treated as errors (thanks to Monty Taylor’s …

Friday was my last day at Sun Microsystems, and today is the first day at my new job (location coming soon). I’ve had a great time at Sun, and thank them for all the opportunities given to me there. I’ll be doing mostly the same work at the new gig, working on projects like Drizzle, but with a slightly different focus. For the most part my day-to-day won’t change much.

Right now I’m focusing on libdrizzle again and am implementing the prepared statement API, cleaning up the MySQL protocol support a little, and also implementing the new Drizzle client/server protocol. I’ll continue to work on Gearman as well, especially where it is relevant to Drizzle. I also need to start blogging again with specific topics in the projects I’m working on, I’ve been fairly quiet lately.

I’ll be in New Zealand next week at Linux Conf AU (yes, it’s not in AU this year). I have a …

A few weeks ago I wrote about a student group who will be working with the Drizzle community to build a new database client tool. While the tool will be the primary replacement for the Drizzle client tool, we hope it will be generic (using the Python DB API) so it will work with others like MySQL and PostgreSQL. We’ve had a number of great discussions, including a session at OpenSQL camp last weekend. I wanted to toss out a few ideas of how such a tool could be structured to allow for maximum extensibility.

One possibility is to borrow from typical Unix shells and DSP processing systems where you have a number of modules with I/O interfaces and data exchange formats between each module. Each module provides a specific signature so you know what other modules it can plug into. Here is a simple example:

A few weeks ago I proposed a project to students at Portland State University for their senior capstone class, and this weekend I found out it was chosen by a group! The project will be a rewrite of the command line tool (the Drizzle tool is currently based on the ‘mysql’ tool), plus a lot of new features. We’re really excited to be working with them, and they seem equally excited about the project too. I hope DBAs, developers, and other folks in the Drizzle/MySQL/MariaDB communities will work with them to help define what features should be part of this new command line client. Some new features we have in mind are background queries, piping and redirection of queries (like a normal shell), and plugin support. It will also support at least the MySQL/MariaDB protocol too since it will be built on libdrizzle, but possibly more if we end up using a common DB API (we’re pondering Python). If you …