While waiting in the line for a breakfast table, I found Reggie Burnett, who is still with MySQL now Oracle. We shared a table and talking about Android and the future of handhelds.

I missed the keynotes by Edward Screven and by Tim O'Reilly. Instead I had scheduled interviews with The 451 Group and then with Robert Scoble. Those both went really well. And I learned that the Screven speech went not so well, which would have been amusing, but not a good use of time.

The rest of the day, so far, has consisted of meeting people, spending time at the Memcached.org booth and the Gear6 booth, and doing more scheduled tech press interviews. Sarah Novotny showed up during the nosh and free beer, right before the BOF sessions.

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While sitting around with Stewart, Eric, Max and Beer at the MySQL Conference and Expo, Stewart thought it would be funny if someone would do a graph showing the trend of Google searches comparing NoSQL and Your Mom. Always wanting to make Stewart laugh, I ran over to Google Trends to see if it could make a graph.

NoSQL vs. Your Mom

Given all the hype these days, you might think that Your Mom would stand no chance against the Juggernaut of NoSQL. But I was quite surprised to see that Your Mom really stuck it to NoSQL. Giving NoSQL some credit, it is making some progress.

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I checked in in the speaker lounge and picked up my bag of shwag. This year O'Reilly is giving speakers some free books, slide:ology and Confessions of a Public Speaker . It makes sense for them to give these books to their speakers, as the better the speakers are, the better the conference is, and the more successful O'Reilly is at getting more conference business.

I spent the first part of the day fielding scheduled calls with members of the tech press about Gear6's …

After spending the morning looking over photographs with the amazingly talented Julian Cash, I drove through the pouring rain from San Francisco to the SJC airport, to pick up Brian Aker. From there, to the convention center, where I linked up with Monty Taylor, Jay Pipes, Stewart Smith, and a number of other people involved in Drizzle and Memcached. And from there, we all headed over to Sarah Sproehnle's place for a potluck party.

So much of the history and development of technology is based on a foundation of personal relationships. The people working on stuff get to know each other, and form friendships outside of just the work, and they introduce each other to their other friends, and from that, connections and cross-fertilization of ideas happen.

This is especially true for open source software and all the aspects of internet technology. The real but mostly …

Back in October I wrote about a student group I was sponsoring to create a new command line tool for Drizzle. The group wrapped up their part of the project (the term ended), and we now have a new tool called Boots! A few of the developers are still active in the project, and I’m planning to get involved more as well. We also have a couple students interested in hacking on it for Drizzle’s Google Summer of Code.

Boots is written in Python and aims to replace the the previous ‘drizzle’ tool (which was modified from the ‘mysql’ command line tool). It doesn’t support everything that the old tool has yet (like tab completion), but it adds some new features. For example, there are multiple ‘lingos’, or modular languages, that can be used to communicate with the …

Back in January when I was between jobs I had a free weekend to do some fun hacking. I decided to start a new open source project that had been brewing in the back of my head and since then have been poking at it on the weekends and an occasional late night. I decided to call it Scale Stack because it aims to provide a scalable network service stack. This may sound a bit generic and boring, but let me show a graph of a database proxy module I slapped together in the past couple days:

I setup MySQL 5.5.2-m2 and ran the sysbench read-only tests against it with 1-8192 threads. I then started up the database proxy module built on Scale Stack so sysbench would route through that, and you can see the concurrency improved quite a bit at higher thread counts. The database module doesn’t do much, it simply does …

Well… the start of it :)

I’ve taken the approach of taking tiny incremental steps (and getting review for each step) in implementing a Storage Engine based on the Embedded InnoDB library. What hit lp:drizzle (the trunk branch, for the 2010-04-07 milestone tarball) is only a handful of these small steps, so this engine is not remotely ready for end users.

There should be more of my Embedded InnoDB work hitting the tree in the upcoming days/weeks, enough to get it to a satte that one could describe as functional :)

• …

So there’s a bit of a swelling around the idea of NoSQL. That is, databases that don’t have an SQL interface in front of them – with the promise of better performance. With a well designed backend, this is no doubt the case.

A flexible query language is rather useful though. I think we’ll see the rise of AlsoSQL. That is systems that present a fast and simple protocol along with a SQL interface.

This hybrid system has seen use for many years. MySQL Cluster is one such example. SQL through MySQL Server, NoSQL through NDB API.

With Drizzle, I feel we’ll be in a pretty good position to offer non-sql based protocols and access methods to existing storage engines.

I spent some time this weekend fixing up the Gearman MySQL UDFs (user defined functions) and fixed a few bugs in the Gearman Server. You can find links to the new releases on the Gearman website. The UDFs now use Monty Taylor’s pandora-build autoconf files instead of the old fragile autoconf setup that relied on pkgconfig.

If you are attending the MySQL Conference & Expo next week and want to learn more about Gearman, be sure to check out one of the three sessions Giuseppe Maxia and I are giving:

• Getting started with Gearman for MySQL
• …

In this post I’m going to describe how to write an authentication plugin for Drizzle. The plugin I’ll be demonstrating is a simple file-based plugin that takes a file containing a list of ‘username:password’ entries (one per line like a .htpasswd file for Apache). The first step is to setup a proper build environment and create a branch, see the Drizzle wiki page to get going. From here I’ll assume you have Drizzle checked out from bzr and are able to compile it.

Setup a development branch and plugin directory

Change to your shared-repository directory for Drizzle and run (assuming you branched ‘lp:drizzle’ to ‘drizzle’):

shell$ bzr branch drizzle auth-file
Branched 1432 revision(s).
shell$ cd auth-file

Next, we’ll want to create the plugin directory and create …