Mark has some good thoughts on drizzle. I think they’re all valid… and have some extra thoughts too:

“I have problems to solve today”. This is (of course) an active concern in my brain… If we don’t have something out that solves some set of problems with reasonable stability and reliability (and soon), then we are failing. I feel we’re getting there, and will have a solid foundation to build upon.

Drizzle replication, MySQL replication: “I can’t compare the two until Drizzle replication is running in production.“. Completely agree. We need to only say replication is stable and reliable when it really is. Realistic test suites are needed. Very defensive programming of the replication system is needed (you want to know when something has gone wrong). …

Finally: Not quite 65 million years in the making (Jurassic Park, hint, hint), but it took about 15 months to get my first book to the printer. A few days ago Udo – my co-author – and I approved the final version of the MySQL Admin Cookbook for publishing. From what I see the book has not been added consistently to the online book stores around the net, but I will most certainly put links on here, as soon as it is available.

I think, before I begin the next one, at least a few months of relaxing are in order….

Last year, at about this time of the year, I was well involved in the process of writing the book Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL" for Wiley. To date, "Pentaho Solutions" is still the only all-round book on the open source Pentaho Business Intelligence suite.

It was an extremely interesting project to participate in, full of new experiences. Although the act of writing was time consuming and at times very trying for me as well as my family, it was completely worth it. I have none but happy memories of the collaboration with my full …

Maureen O’Gara, self-described as “the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years”, has written an article about Drizzle at Rackspace for one of Sys-con’s online zines called Cloud Computing Journal, of which she is an editor.

I tried commenting on Maureen’s article on their website, but the login system is apparently borked, at least for registered users who use OpenID, which it wants to still have a separate user ID and login. Note to sys-con.com: OpenID is designed so that users don’t have to remember yet another login for your website.

Besides having little patience for content-sparse websites that simply provide an online haven for dozens of Flash …

I'm pleased to announce the release of Spider storage engine version 2.16(beta) and Vertical Partitioning storage engine version 0.9(beta).
Spider is a Storage Engine for database sharding.
http://spiderformysql.com/
Vertical Partitioning is a Storage Engine for vertical partitioning for a table.
http://launchpad.net/vpformysql

The main changes in this version are following.
(This release for Vertical Partitioning is a bug fix release)
- Add table parameter "semi_split_read".
- Add server parameter "spider_semi_split_read".
  This parameters are for searching performance improvement.

Please see "99_change_logs.txt" in the download documents for checking other changes.

Enjoy!

Adrian has talked about a few of us Drizzle Hackers joining Rackspace over at the Rackspace Cloud Blog.

Hi one and all!

Interested in database systems? Interested because you use them? Because you manage them? Write SQL that goes to them? Or are you one of the people of questionable sanity like myself who develops them?

Well… do we have the offer for you.

Friday, April 16th. Right after the MySQL Conference and Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center, you can come along to the Drizzle Developer Day.

You will want to add your name to this wiki page: http://drizzle.org/wiki/Drizzle_Developer_Day_2010_signup

Suggest topics over at:
http://drizzle.org/wiki/Drizzle_Developer_Day_2010

…

Some people have been confused by my Twitter stream from last week's NoSQL Live in Boston conference.  I've never been very good at staying "on message", or adhering to a set of "talking points".  Some people thought I was there to "defend the status quo", or to defend and promote memcached, or memcached+mysql.

True, I was there in part to teach about and promote memcached, and especially Gear6 Memcached.  I have a great employer, but they are not sending me to conferences because they are a charity.  I taught the memcached  breakout session, and also worked the "hallway track", giving a number of people a crash course in what memcache is and what makes it useful, and handed out a pile of business cards.

As for my tweets and pithy statements... Well, some over-simplification has to …

Attending a Muay Thai boxing match and wandering around the Patpong market a bit.

Here are some sparring clips spliced together:

…

Over the past six weeks or so, I have been working on cleaning up the pluggable storage engine API in Drizzle.  I’d like to describe some of this work and talk a bit about the next steps I’m taking in the coming months as we roll towards implementing Log Shipping in Drizzle.

First, how did it come about that I started working on the storage engine API?

From Commands to Transactions

Well, it really goes back to my work on Drizzle’s replication system.  I had implemented a simple, fast, and extensible log which stored records of the data changes made to a server.  Originally, the log was called the Command Log, because the Google Protobuffer messages it contained were called message::Commands.  …