Back in 2005 a user requested on the MySQL bug tracker that the TIME/DATE based data types store microseconds.  I personally don’t think this is an unreasonable request and judging by the many posts to the bug report by users between then and now this is something quite a few people would like to see.

In Drizzle we asked ‘What if…‘ and Brian came up with the answer.  We now (in trunk and in next week’s release) have TIMESTAMP and NOW() with microsecond precision.

To create a TIMESTAMP column that uses microseconds you simply need to specify TIMESTAMP(6) in your table definition, for example:

CREATE TABLE `t1` (
 `a` INT DEFAULT NULL,
 `b` TIMESTAMP(6) NULL DEFAULT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB

I was looking back at Drizzle blog posts today, and noticed the first couple announcing to the world that Drizzle exists are entitled ‘What if’.  These are two powerful words which can often drive innovation.  I was suddenly reminded of a UK advert for Honda called ‘OK Factory’ where one worker decides to go against the grain and ponder ‘What if’:

(for those who have problems with the embedded Daily Motion a YouTube version is available here)

In Feburary we aim to show you what these two powerful words can produce.  At the very least, I hope the Drizzle project inspires others to ponder ‘What if…’

…

A long time ago, in a time that can only serve to make some feel old and others older, MySQL didn’t support transactions. Each statement was executed as it went, there was no ROLLBACK (or COMMIT or crash recovery etc). Then there were transactions. Other RDBMSs implement auto_commit functionality, but for MySQL users, we think of it as the magic compatibility mode that (mostly) makes applications written for MyISAM magically work on InnoDB (okay, and making “you should use transactions” a really easy consulting gig :)

I’m currently working on finishing up a patch that removes the implicit COMMIT from DDL operations in Drizzle. Instead, you get an error message saying that Transactional DDL is not currently supported. I see a future where we have one of two situations (possibly depending on the storage engine): support DDL within normal transactions, DDL only transactions (cannot mix …

I just received a confirmation that my presentation proposal for the MySQL user conference 2011 was accepted! The title for my proposal is MQL-to-SQL: a JSON-based Query Language for RDBMS Access from AJAX Applications, and it covers pretty much everything implied by the title.

As always, the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Santa Clara, California serves as the venue. The conference will be held from April 11-14. Except for the venue and period, I think this year's conference will bear few similarities to previous editions. Let me try and explain.

This year's theme is "MySQL, the ecosystem and …

If your storage engine returns an error from rnd_init (or doStartTableScan as it’s named in Drizzle) and does not save this error and return it in any subsequent calls to rnd_next, your engine is buggy. Namely it is buggy in that a) an error may not be reported back to the user and b) everything may explode horribly when rnd_next is called after rnd_init returned an error.

Unless it is running on MariaDB 5.2 or (soon, when the patch hits the tree) Drizzle.

Monty (Widenius, not Taylor) wrote a patch for MariaDB based on my bug …

OK, yes, I was kinda sad enough at the end of December to convert 2011 to hex to find it is 7DB.  Which I think is appropriate as for me at least this will be the year of Drizzle7 DBMS.

It may be the winter holiday season but many of us Drizzle developers haven’t taken much of a break.  I have been working hard to keep our bug count down and will be working on some really cool new features this month.  Brian Aker has also announced things that he has been working on in this mailing list post.

So, what can you expect from the Drizzle project in year 7DB?  Here is a sneak preview of a few things off the top of my head (I really hope I haven’t missed anyone here):

1. Completion of replication support (thanks to …

Most of the time I think of myself as living in a fairly progressive and enlightened world. I'm fotunate that I work with a set of wonderful people, I can travel all over the world and I'm a member of an excellent theatre company. As a result, hatred of things, or at least expressions of hatred are generally just not tolerated in any of the circles in which I run. (With the exception, of course, of things that FAIL, like a particularly bad piece of code - but even then it's less about hatred and more about not liking something that didn't work)

There are two social acceptable exceptions to that rule, though: Americans, and cats.

I was reading a blog post earlier this morning (which I won't link to because that's not the point here) which was a fun post about older people finding new music. As a person who is not getting any younger myself, the blog post was quite enjoyable. Smack in the middle of it though, there was a fairly …

O’Reilly’s 2011 edition of the MySQL conference has an expanded agenda, with good representation from Postgres, CouchDB, MongoDB, and others. Take a look at the full schedule listing, which is being filled out as talks are approved and the speakers verify that they’ll give the session.

I am certainly looking forward to this year’s event. A tremendous amount of progress has landed in GA versions of open-source databases this year. To name just a couple, there’s a new version of Postgres (9.0) with built-in replication and many more improvements; there’s MySQL 5.5 GA; there’s the HandlerSocket NoSQL interface to MySQL; Drizzle has a beta release; and the list goes on. I believe that this conference will have balanced and representative coverage of what’s really important to users. …

My recent account of The State of MySQL forks seems to have gotten quite a lot of attention. I promised to follow up with a separate piece about Drizzle and also PostgreSQL, as the other major open source database, so I'd better keep that promise now.

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Over the last few months I have been pleasantly surprised by the number of people using open source builds of Tungsten.  My company, Continuent, has therefore started to offer support for open source users and will likely expand these services to meet demand.

There have also been a number of requests to add specific features to open source builds, especially for replication. We have added a few already but are now considering pushing even more features into open source if we can find sponsors.  These add to a number of great features already in open source like global transaction IDs, MySQL 5.0/5.1, basic drizzle replication, transaction filtering, and many others. 

Do you have special replication or clustering features you would like to see added to Tungsten? Specialized MySQL to PostgreSQL replication?  Management and monitoring commands?  Cool parallel replication problems?  …