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 …

A new version of PBMS for drizzle has been pushed up to launchpad:

drizzle_pbmsV2

I have rewritten PBMS and changed the way that BLOBs are referenced in order to make PBMS more flexible and to fix some of it's limitations. I have also removed some of the more confusing parts of the code and reorganized it in an attempt to make it easier for people to find there way around it.

So apart form some cosmetic changes what is different?

Maybe the best answer would be to say what hasn't changed: the user and engine API  and the way in which the actual data is stored on the disk remains pretty much unchanged, but everything else has changed.

The best place to start is with the BLOB URL, the old URL looked like this:
"~*1261157929~5-128-6147b252-0-0-37" the new URL looks …

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 releasing InnoDB Hot Backup for Drizzle is rather minimal.

So enter xtrabackup as a …

My previous post focused on some of the problems of doing multi-tenant MySQL.

One of the reasons why I started hacking on Drizzle was that the multi-tenancy options for MySQL just weren’t very good (this is also the reason why I run my blog in a VM and not a shared hosting solution).

What you really want is to be able to give your users access to a virtual database server. What you don’t want is to be administering a separate database server for each of your users. What you want are CATALOGs.

A CATALOG is a collection of SCHEMAs (which have TABLEs in them). Each CATALOG is isolated from all the others. Once you connect to a catalog, that’s it. They are entirely separate units. There are no cross-catalog queries or CHANGE CATALOG commands. It is as if each catalog is its own database server.

There have been a couple of recent blog articles (here and here) asking for parallel replication based on something other than schemas.  These articles both focus on the problem of parallelizing updates within a single MySQL schema.  I read these with great interest, not least because they both mentioned Tungsten (thanks!) and also found that our schema-based parallelization approach is too limited.  It is therefore worth a short article explaining exactly what the Tungsten approach is and why we chose it.

First of all, Tungsten does not exactly use schema-based parallel replication.  Tungsten …

Since the GA release of Drizzle7 I’ve had several people asking me about how to convert their MySQL sites to use Drizzle instead.  By far the most common one to crop-up is WordPress.  This is aimed to be a simple guide to starting a new blog using WordPress 3.1 and Drizzle.

Initial Problems

WordPress by design is very MySQL orientated, for the most part this is good thing, but when trying to switch to another database for it there can be complications.  An attempt has been made to create a plugin to use Drizzle, but unfortunately it has side-effects such as modifying your content if you happen to blog about anything related to MySQL or Drizzle.  For the purposes of this blog post I have create a patch and will give instructions on how to use it below.  If any WordPress guru has a way to make this into a good plugin, please get in touch!

Conversions Needed

Almost all the conversions for …

Since the GA release of Drizzle7 I've had several people asking me about how to convert their MySQL sites to use Drizzle instead.  By far the most common one to crop-up is Wordpress.  This is aimed to be a simple guide to starting a new blog using Wordpress 3.1 and Drizzle.
Initial Problems
Wordpress by design is very MySQL orientated, for the most part this is good thing, but when trying to switch to another database for it there can be complications.  An attempt has been made to create a plugin to use Drizzle, but unfortunately it has side-effects such as modifying your content if you happen to blog about anything related to MySQL or Drizzle.  For the purposes of this blog post I have create a patch and will give instructions on how to use it below.  If any Wordpress guru has a way to make this into a good plugin, please get in touch!
Conversions Needed
Almost all the conversions for Wordpress …

Paranoid Android. Canonical and Gnome. A new OSI. And more.

Paranoid Android
If you are interested in the potential violation of the GPL by the Android kernel you have probably already immersed yourself in the numerous blog posts published on the topic. If not, start with Sean Hogle’s analysis or Bradley M Kuhn’s overview of the original allegations and work backwards from there, not forgetting a detour for the obligatory Microsoft connection. Linus Torvalds said claim “seems totally bogus”. In the meantime, Microsoft …

Welcome to the latest edition of Last Week in Drizzle.  This week we announced our GA release!!  Interest in Drizzle in the last week has been much higher than anticipated, this blog alone got 4,500 visitors on Wednesday! (which was also a nice test for the Drizzle database powering it)

GA Release

So, on Tuesday the tarball was cut for our GA release called Drizzle7.  Most of the changes from the last week relate to code cleanup, documentation and test suite improvements so that we could keep the codebase stable ready for the release (also many of us are busy writing conference talks around now ).  For a quick summary of what to expect in Drizzle7 and the future you can see my three-part special called “Drizzle – The Icing on the Cake”: part 1 part 2 …