Will Drizzle (Brian, Monty, Mark, MontyT, and others ...) become a cloudburst? I think so, and here is why...

First a simple question: what made diverse systems such as PHP, the HTTP protocol and memcached so popular?

Answer: ease of use, simplicity, speed and scalability.

And what made the original version of MySQL so popular? Well, exactly the same things.

Drizzle goes back to the roots, concentrating on what made the use of MySQL so widespread in the …

Simon Phipps hopes to change the way Sun deals with intellectual property rights. READ MORE

Today Brian launched Drizzle, something he's been working on for a number of weeks now, together with some other Sun/MySQL people and quite a few active MySQL community members. I scribbled some quick info and my own perspective on About Drizzle, with links to the various currently available resources.

I think it's an interesting and worthwhile development, and I understand it has the okidoki from inside Sun; Monty also noted this. We'll have to see how that goes though. It amounts to an internal fork, doesn't it... Drizzle is not directly a MySQL replacement, but it does kinda wipe the floor with MySQL's current development process, roadmap, licensing and business model. I do commend Sun on allowing a …

At OSCON, Brian and Dormando gave their ever famous talk, Memcached and MySQL: Everything You Need To Know. I didn’t attend the tutorial, but they assured me it was similar to what was given at the MySQL Conference 2008 (everything, but the very nice buttons dormando was giving out with the memcached logo!). Great, because not only is memcached hot, but I have notes from their talk: Memcached and MySQL tutorial.

Interestingly enough (and this didn’t happen at OSCON), …

I don’t know about “me too” types of bug replies, but before everyone goes to the bug database and starts saying “me too”, “this affects me”, “please fix this ASAP”, “I won’t use MySQL 5.1 till this is fixed”, I wonder if this will cause more harm (i.e. more bug spam for the developer, and all those subscribed to it) than good.

It seems like the public Worklog interface gets this right - via voting. Having a count of those that have the same problems, even displayed via “stars”, is a much better interface, and shows urgency a lot better than “me too” posts.

Take one of my favourite worklogs - …

Before today, Drizzle was known as a light form of rain found in Seattle (among other places). Not any more. If you have not read the news already today, Drizzle, Clouds, “What If?” is the new kid on the RDBMS bock.

Faster, leaner and designed with the original goals of ease-of-use, reliability and performance, Drizzle will make an impact in those organizations that are seeking a viable database storage solution for large scalable applications. The key to Drizzle is several fold. First, the crud has been removed. The first part of Drizzle development is to remove bloat or non functioning software from the MySQL tree. In fact if you monitor the commits, it reads like, this has been removed, these files have been deleted, this code has been refactored, this new library has been introduced. Design decisions that have limited MySQL’s development for years are being …

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 …