I’ve been spending the last several weeks hacking on Drizzle, which is based on recent code from MySQL 6.0 and which Brian announced earlier today.

I’ve been having tons of fun, and have cleaned up lots of stuff which had bugged me for a while. I’m currently trying to end the reliance of the client library on mysys and mystrings… but that’s a story for later. One of the things I’m happiest about so far is that we are currently building with:

-W -Wall -Wextra -std=gnu++98 -pedantic -Wundef -Wredundant-decls -Wno-long-long -Wno-strict-aliasing -Werror

for C++ and:

-W -Wall -Wextra -std=gnu99 -pedantic -Wundef -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes -Wmissing-declarations -Wredundant-decls -Wno-strict-aliasing -Werror

for …

Launching a Startup in 3 Hours was a great talk given by Andrew Hyde (of techstars.org) and Gavin Doughtie (of Google). Both of the speakers are heavily involved in the recent trend of doing “Startup Weekends”, and techstars.org is an organization that hosts startup weekends all around the US (and I think internationally as well - Andrew mentioned one in Germany if I heard correctly).

The first half of the talk was about the general concept of a startup weekend, the problems it avoids (”we’ve been working for 9 months and haven’t launched anything”), the problems it brings up (”If you’re not using Java, you’re an idiot, so count me out!!”), and lots of details about how to organize, how to assign roles, and some common tools they use (like Basecamp and whatever your IM of choice is). There was also talk of legal issues, how (basically) to think about forming the company with the people involved, and decisions that need to …

Yesterday I had a good conversation with Monty Widenius (a MySQL founder) about MySQL 5.1. Specifically, about the fact that MySQL 5.1 is not a GA (generally available) release.

My impression, which was wrong, was that it was difficult getting critical mass to download 5.1 and use it simply because it was not a GA release yet. I thought the paradox of needing to have a certain amount of usage before release was the barrier.

That’s not the case at all.
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Looks like drizzle is announced now. I’ve spent a bit of time after work and on lunch breaks helping out here and there, and I’m excited about working on a database project again. Why am I working on the project? Average time from when I write a patch to when it goes into the tree has been measured in minutes, not in hours/days/weeks/months. Yes, I’m running the test suite first. Yes, I’m getting another person to review the code first. This is an example of how adding people to a project can slow it down, and how getting out of the way of the engineers can have amazing results. We set up bug tracker, code hosting, team organization, package build system, mailing list, IRC channel, and …

While the MySQL 5.1 feature list looks quite tasty to me, the MySQL 5 feature list has not really won me over. Aside from the fact that most new MYSQL 5 features have been quite bug plagued (though this is now mostly resolved side from the performance issues with VIEW's and INFORMATION_SCHEMA). So Arjen is doing some courses on MySQL 5 features, which got me thinking which are the features I regularly use? Uhm .. I think there is only one, which are VIEW's. Actually I always end up using them for the same thing: Computing a status field that changes given the CURRENT_DATE. I tend to try and avoid cron jobs for these tasks whenever I can. Of course it would be more performant to update the status once, but replying on the status update cron job to actually work right at the expected time is …

The RarestNews developer considers InnoDB and CouchDB for a re-architection of his high volume news site. He did his homework researching, but I couldn’t help but comment on a few things he wrote. The comment turned into a blog post and since this is my blog it should be posted here as well.

I am specifically referring to the paragraphs about InnoDB and CouchDB:

MySQL problems

So, to be technical here I’ve used MyISAM tables (never really liked InnoDB because of it’s slow writes and at 100k new articles a day with lots of meta-data to write about them, like tags, dates, snippets, word frequencies, etc) - it seemed like a good decision. The bad part was that on write …

The RarestNews developer considers InnoDB and CouchDB for a re-architection of his high volume news site. He did his homework researching, but I couldn’t help but comment on a few things he wrote. The comment turned into a blog post and since this is my blog it should be posted here as well.

I am specifically referring to the paragraphs about InnoDB and CouchDB:

MySQL problems

So, to be technical here I’ve used MyISAM tables (never really liked InnoDB because of it’s slow writes and at 100k new articles a day with lots of meta-data to write about them, like tags, dates, snippets, word frequencies, etc) - it seemed like a good decision. The bad part was that on write …

If only your database would just tell you that replication had failed or that the disk was full…
Ok some database servers do but MySQL doesn’t (yet). Another excuse to write a script

In my pursuit for total database visibility I have been searching for a tool that would tell me when something went wrong, that would simulate regular usage, and let me know if anything failed. After all SNMP can only probe so far and if your database is secure the last thing you want to do is open up another port on your server.

Don’t get me wrong there are tools out there that do a decent job of monitoring MySQL. MySQL Entperprise Monitor is one such tool. But if you want to look under the hood or add some functionality specific to your environment things start to get …

The RarestNews developer considers InnoDB and CouchDB for a re-architection of his high volume news site. He did his homework researching, but I couldn’t help but comment on a few things he wrote. The comment turned into a blog post and since this is my blog it should be posted here as well.

I am specifically referring to the paragraphs about InnoDB and CouchDB:

MySQL problems

So, to be technical here I’ve used MyISAM tables (never really liked InnoDB because of it’s slow writes and at 100k new articles a day with lots of meta-data to write about them, like tags, dates, snippets, word frequencies, etc) - it seemed like a good decision. The bad part was that on write …

I am writing this blog post up on Friday morning, to post on Monday Tuesday morning at OScon.

The big news in the MySQL and the open source database worlds right now is Drizzle.

This is the "secret project" that I have occationally mentioned here. For the past few weeks, when I was done giving my PS client their daily 8 hours, I would flip VMs and start hacking on Drizzle, focusing mainly on the plugin system. I've ripped out a lot of junk and useless code, changed the plugin interface structures, converted UDFs into plugins, and am currently working on making logging and authentication into plugins.

The bzr tree is rapidly changing, and getting leaner, cleaner, better, and faster, with each passing day. The email list and the freenode IRC channel have been clear and focused.

It's been very exciting.