The frustration builds.

I have come to despise MySQL's sql_mode. It is a hack of the most gargantuan proportions.

Basically, the optimizer just ignores the sql_mode whenever it is convenient for it to do so. More importantly, the optimizer silently ignores bad datetime input in various places. The reason for this is because of my statement above: sql_mode is a big ole' hack. Instead of fixing the runtime executor in MySQL to use real ValueObject types — that are immutable and know how to convert (and not convert) between each other, the runtime is a mess of checks for various runtime codes, warning modes, "count_cuted_field" crap and other miscellany that obfuscates the executor pipeline almost beyond recognition.

Slowly, I am attacking the mess, but the executor is so fragile that even tiny changes can wreak havoc on the system, so the going is slow and painful. It's no wonder that the release cycle for the MySQL …

Over the past few weeks, I have been happy working on Drizzle. Why have I been happy? Is it because of some new incredible code that will revolutionize the database industry? Nope. Is it because we've been able to remove all the issues that plague the server core? Nope. Is it because I see Drizzle quickly morphing into a modular, standard-conforming super-kernel? Nope.

So, why am I joyous?

To paraphrase the late Charlton Heston: "[Drizzle] is people!"

Recently, I've seen the fruit that transparent, open source development bears. This fruit takes the form of engaged, motivated, and humble individuals who wish to make their mark on a project.

Whether it's on IRC on #drizzle, the …

Like I mentioned in my previous article, I've been working on refactoring the temporal data handling in Drizzle. The major problem I've been dealing with is poorly or non-documented code. The lack of documentation has led me to rely on the MySQL Manual in some cases, and then additional research and lastly, my own intuition as to what was going on.

One of the earliest cases of me saying "WTF?" was when I was investigating how day numbers were calculated. Here is the original, unmodified code from MySQL (/libmysql/my_time.c:746-778). I've highlighted in blue the massive amount of comments explaining the inner workings of the function and what it is doing.

/*
  Calculate nr of day since year 0 in new date-system (from 1615)

  SYNOPSIS
    calc_daynr()
    year                 Year (exact 4 digit year, no year conversions)
    month                Month
    day                  Day

  NOTES: 0000-00-00 is a valid date, and will return …

So, you want to compile Workbench for Linux, on Fedora 9. You need to install the following packages:

autoconf automake libtool libzip-devel libxml2-devel libsigc++20-devel libglade2-devel gtkmm24-devel mesa-libGLU-devel mysql-libs mysql mysql-devel uuid-devel lua-devel glitz-devel glitz-glx-devel pixman-devel pcre-devel libgnome-devel gtk+-devel pango-devel cairo

I feel I’m being too liberal with dependencies, but I’m not about to strip it, I just want to get it working first :)

You need to have ctemplate and ctemplate-devel installed from updates-testing-newkey (relevant koji build log).

By default, configure.in in Workbench looks for “google-ctemplate”, as opposed to just “ctemplate” as Fedora calls it. You can fix this (easy), or “cheat” - in /usr/local/include you can do sudo ln -s …

In this second part of my Launchpad guidebook series, I'll be covering the code management and repository features of Launchpad.net. If you missed the first part of my series, go check it out and get established on Launchpad.net. Then pop back to this article to dive into the magic of http://code.launchpad.net. In this article, we'll cover the following aspects of the code management pieces of Launchpad:

• The Structure of Project Source Code on Launchpad.net
• Pulling Code into a Local Repository
• Creating a Local Working Branch for Bug Fixing
• Pushing Code to Launchpad
• Notifying a Merge Captain of Your Code Pushes
• Keeping Trunk Up To Date
• Merging Local Code with a Trunk …

This article explains how to set up a properly functioning C/C++ development environment on Linux. The article is aimed at developers interested in contributing to the Drizzle server project, but the vast majority of the content applies equally well to developers wishing to contribute to the MySQL server or any other open source project written in C/C++

IMPORTANT: This article doesn't get into any religious battles over IDEs or particular editors. IDEs and editors are what you use to edit code. What this article covers is the surrounding libraries, toolchain, and dependencies needed to get into the development or contirbution process. That said, go Vim.

The examples shown use the Debian/Ubuntu methods of obtaining code packages and …

Last week, I described how to use the MySQL plug-in API to write a minimal 'Hello world!' information schema plug-in. The main purpose of that plug-in is to illustrate the bare essentials of the MySQL information schema plug-in interface.

In this article, I'd like to take that to the next level and demonstrate how to write an information schema plug-in that can access some of the internals of the MySQL server. For this particular purpose, we will focus on a plug-in that reports all the SAVEPOINTs available in the current session. This …

I wrote previously about looking for a more powerful search solution, and I mentioned that Xapian wasn’t quite so convenient in indexing my data. I then chose to experiment with sphinx a little more, and proceeded to create a number of search engines and indexed a number of data sources in order to decide which direction to go. Unfortunately, while sphinx was convenient and still provides an excellent backend for basic search indexes, I’m revisiting Xapian once again based on it’s more-than-anticipated flexibility. I was brief in my explanation of Xapian however, and didn’t mention some of the more important and powerful aspects of it.

Xapian provides an API

Xapian is primarily an API for search indexing/data retrieval. They do provide a handy utility called Omega (available here) for indexing static pages and a plethora of other mime-types. However, I’m in …