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 much code). I then created a simple way to find out the version of the Drizzle server you …

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 Developer Day which contained people from every level, new users to some of the biggest names in MySQL …

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 Developer Day which contained people from every level, new users to some of the …

Last week I wrote about my experience compiling Drizzle 7 on Mac OS X 10.6. Then David Shrewsbury informed me of his nearly identical blog post: Installing Drizzle from source on OS X. Once Drizzle 7 was running on my box, I immediately looked to see what plugins where available because Drizzle uses a lot of plugins and they are one of its notable differences from MySQL. In my humble opinion, Drizzle’s plugins will primarily influence how database professionals evaluate and decide whether or not to use Drizzle because so many of Drizzle’s features are plugins. Therefore, let’s look briefly at some the plugins included with Drizzle 7.

The plugin directory of the Drizzle 7 tarball lists 79 plugins. Each plugin …

 (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:

read more

Just a reminder that I will be presenting a session on PBMS at the
MySQL Conference on Thursday April 14 at 10:50.

The title is "BLOB Data And Thinking Out Side The Box" where I will be talking about the new PBMS daemon with a focus on how it handles replication and backup.


Hope to see you there!

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 support to organizations from the startup to divisions of Fortune 500 …

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 …

Drizzle 7 GA has been released, so I wanted to compile and test it on my Mac running OS X 10.6.7.  Since Drizzle 7 is new, Mac binaries are not available yet.  I’ve compiled MySQL from source more times than I can remember, and Drizzle was forked from MySQL, so I expected the build process to be similar and pain-free, and for the most part it was.  I did not use MacPorts or Homebrew for various reasons, mainly because I know that I will compile, tweak and recompile Drizzle often while hacking on it.  Also, the blog post  Drizzle in the Snow is about building Drizzle on Mac OS X, but it’s out of date …

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 sql_connection setting in either your glance.conf or your …