We just released the latest Drizzle tarball (2010-10-11 milestone). There are a whole bunch of bug fixes, but there are two things that are interesting from a storage engine point of view:

• The Innobase plugin is now based on innodb_plugin 1.0.6
• The embedded_innodb engine is now named HailDB and requires HailDB, it can no longer be built with embedded_innodb.

Those of you following Drizzle fairly closely have probably noticed that we’ve lagged behind in InnoDB versions. I’m actively working on fixing that – both for the innobase plugin and for the HailDB library.

If building the HailDB plugin (which is planned to replace the innobase plugin), you’ll need the latest …

Last Tuesday I read the post from Dave where he encouraged people to give drizzle a shot. It got me thinking “why on earth have I not tried it before?” and so Wednesday night, having the options of watching criminal minds or dexter on tv or compiling drizzle, i figured, lets do the right thing for once and get on with it.

I must say, I was not too eager to compile a new tool but the guys at drizzle have done a good job (at least as regards Ubuntu (Lucid) since thats where I installed it) at documenting what is needed. I only needed to improvise a couple of times but that was it.

So here go the commands I used:

sudo apt-get install -y python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:drizzle-developers/ppa
sudo …

One of Drizzle’s great strengths is that it is not afraid to deviate from its MySQL origins.  Unfortunately the side-effect of this is that it can make migration from MySQL to Drizzle more difficult.  I have previous noted that drizzledump can do the schema migration for you.  Now I will go into more details with some other information that may be useful if you are considering migration.

The first thing I should point out is that the default storage engine in Drizzle in InnoDB, MyISAM exists only for temporary tables and we have some other options such as PBXT and BlitzDB.  As a kind-of side effect to this, there is no FULLTEXT indexes in Drizzle, so these have to be dropped as part of the migration.

When it comes to integer types we …

Just in case you missed it, I’m rather thrilled that our latest tarball of Drizzle is named Beta. Specifically, we’re calling it Drizzle7. Seven is a very nice number, and it seems rather appropriate.

This release is for a stand alone database server. A lot of the infrastructure for replication is there (with testing), but the big thing we want to hammer on and get perfect here is Drizzle7 as a stand alone database server.

Can I trust it? If you trust InnoDB to store your data, then yes, you can trust Drizzle (it uses InnoDB too)

Today is a big day for us working on the Drizzle project.  Our first official Beta! We have come a long way since the original MySQL 6.0 fork and we couldn’t have done it without the many community contributors involved, so many thanks to everyone who has helped us to get here (you know who you are).

One feature I have been working on recently is a MySQL migration tool.  This is basically a large modification to drizzledump which can do two extra things:

Firstly, it will automatically detect whether it is connecting to a MySQL or Drizzle server.  When connecting to a MySQL server it will automatically convert the table structures and data to create a Drizzle compatible dump file.

On top of this there are new options so that drizzledump can connect straight to a Drizzle server at the same time as a MySQL server and pipe the data …

I'm happy to announce that today we've released the first beta of Drizzle7! It's been an exciting ride so far and I'm expecting it to be only more exciting moving forward, now that I can actually say things like "yes! please try it!"

Some quick thoughts:

• We're speaking MySQL Protocol over 3306 by default - all of your MySQL connectors should work fine.
• drizzledump can read from MySQL and write to Drizzle.
• Replication has changed.
• Authentication has changed.
• Options processing has changed.
• There are tons of plugins.

We're actually going to care about breaking things moving forward. 

So... yes! please try it! I'm excited to find out what new things people are going to try to do with it. …

Yes, I said InnoDB+ with a plus sign at the end (also see the first comment here).

Please note that this blog post is only based on public information. It has absolutely nothing in it that I only could have learned from back when I worked at Sun or MySQL AB. Everything has links or pointers to where you can find the information out on the Internet and all thoughts are based on stringing these things together.

There was a lot of talk around the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle about MySQL (MySQL AB was bought by Sun). Some of the talk centred around Oracle and their ability to make a closed source version of MySQL with added bits that wouldn’t …

This miniconf aims to cover many of the current methods of data storage and retrieval and attempt to bring order to the universe. We’re aiming to cover what various systems do, what the latest developments are and what you should use for various applications.

We aim for talks from developers of and developers using the software in question.

Aiming for some combination of: PostgreSQL, Drizzle, MySQL, XFS, ext[34], Swift (open source cloud storage, part of OpenStack), memcached, TokyoCabinet, TDB/CTDB, CouchDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, HBase….. and more!

Call for Papers open NOW (Until 22nd October).

Yesterday, I reached a happy milestone in HailDB development. All compiler warnings left in the api/ directory (the public interface to the database engine) are now either probable/possible bugs (that we need to look at closely) or are warnings due to unfinished code (that we should finish).

There’s still a bunch of compiler warnings that we’ve inherited (HailDB compiles with lots of warnings enabled) that we have to get through, but a lot will wait until after we update the core to be based on InnoDB 1.1.

I have recently moved on from my roll as a Senior MySQL Support Engineer at Oracle to a Drizzle Developer at Rackspace.  As such my previous blog is now sitting idle so this is the replacement.

This new blog may have much less MySQL Cluster content, but I do hope to continue the same quality (I shall leave you to judge on how high that is!) of blog posts.