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 …

The headline above could fit in a tweet, but Drizzle making its first release almost 3 years after the project started deserves a blog post.

Brian Aker has a long blog post looking back at these 3 years (and even longer into MySQL history). Stewart Smith has an entertaining personal perspective. .frm files, I will not miss you (if I were to start using Drizzle, that is). Planet Drizzle has an avalanche of posts from most Drizzle devs celebrating this event.

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As a big fan of new technology, we try to keep up to date with what’s happening in the industry. As such, I decided to start using drizzle on my development machine since they announced GA this week. First exercise: import a file dumped from a MySQL server I don’t have access to into drizzle. Normally, you can use drizzledump on the mysql server and make it dump a drizzle compatible file. Not in this case, so I decided to sed my way through the various errors. Not pretty, and I hope that at some point we’ll have a tool that can convert a mysqldump into a drizzle compatible file, but it works for now. Here’s what I had to do. Note that this is by no means complete or comes with any guarantees, it’s just a starting point.

# This file started by setting a SQL_MODE. That doesn't …

Photo by Sifu Renka under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license

In the second part of this three part special on the GA release of Drizzle7 I covered the development and testing model we use for Drizzle.  In this final part I will cover what you can expect from the future of Drizzle.

What to expect in the future

Whilst we are very proud of the GA release of Drizzle7 there are still features we would like to implement that we could not complete before the release.  Whether the next release is Drizzle7.1 or Drizzle8, we haven’t quite decided yet.  But one thing is for sure, we will not be making you wait 3 years for it, expect the next GA to come later this year!  Some of the features I outline here might not …

[caption id="attachment_159" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Photo by Sifu Renka under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license"][/caption]

In the second part of this three part special on the GA release of Drizzle7 I covered the development and testing model we use for Drizzle.  In this final part I will cover what you can expect from the future of Drizzle.
What to expect in the future
Whilst we are very proud of the GA release of Drizzle7 there are still features we would like to implement that we could not complete before the release.  Whether the next release is Drizzle7.1 or Drizzle8, we haven't quite decided yet.  But one thing is for sure, we will not be making you wait 3 years for it, expect the next GA to come …

When writing my Dropping ACID: Eating Data in a Web 2.0 Cloud World talk for LCA2011 I came to the realisation that I had forgotten a lot of the things I had worked on in MySQL and MySQL Cluster. So, as a bit of a retrospective as part of the Drizzle7 GA release, I thought I might try and write down a (incomplete) list of the various things I’ve worked on in Drizzle.

I noticed I did a lot of code removal, that’s all fine and dandy but maybe I won’t list all of that… except perhaps my first branch that was merged :)

2008

• First ever branch that was merged: some mysys removal (use POSIX functions instead of wrappers that sometimes have different semantics than their POSIX functions), some removal of NETWARE, build scripts that weren’t helpful (i.e. weren’t what any build team ever used to build a release) and some other dead code removal.
…

With the HUGE news of Drizzle’s first GA, I thought it appropriate that I spend some time discussing the testing that has gone into this release.

I tend to agree with Stewart’s assessment of our quality – it is solid and I think that you will find yourself pleasantly surprised and not at all angry when using it, but it is always in the eye of the user ; )  With that said, I did want to highlight some areas of interest.

To begin with, as we are a fork of MySQL, the bulk of our test suite comes directly from there as well.  Most of the standard mysql-test-run tests that are used to validate MySQL are also used for Drizzle.  All of the basics like …

Photo by Stéfan under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license

In part 1 of this 3 part series I talked about what is new in the recently released Drizzle7 and what makes it different to MySQL.  In this part I will talk about the development and testing processes behind Drizzle.

The Development Model

Drizzle is developed differently to many open source products.  Instead of dual-licensing Drizzle is developed by companies and users that actually use the product.  No part of it is closed-source and there is no contributor agreement to sign.  We have had many open source developers come from seemingly nowhere to join in development which is fantastic. …

[caption id="attachment_153" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Photo by Stéfan under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license"][/caption]

In part 1 of this 3 part series I talked about what is new in the recently released Drizzle7 and what makes it different to MySQL.  In this part I will talk about the development and testing processes behind Drizzle.
The Development Model
Drizzle is developed differently to many open source products.  Instead of dual-licensing Drizzle is developed by companies and users that actually use the product.  No part of it is closed-source and there is no contributor agreement to sign.  We have had many open source developers come …

We’ve released Drizzle7! Not only that, we’re now calling it Generally Available – a GA release.

What does this mean? What does this GA label mean?

You could view as a GA label being “we’re pretty confident people aren’t going to on mass ask for our heads when they start using it”… which isn’t a too bad description. We also plan to maintain it, there could be future releases in this series that just include bug fixes – we won’t just immediately tell you to go and use the latest tarball or bzr tree. This release series is a good one to use.

Drizzle7 is something that can be packaged in Linux distros. It’s no longer something where the best bet is to add the PPA and upgrade every two weeks or build …