Reading “Test Center: Slacker databases break all the old rules” has finally inspired me to write this post, which I’ve been meaning to do for a while. The title of my post may be bold, but it is just one version of how things may go moving forward (and was meant to grab your attention). :)

First off, a few issues I have with the article mentioned above:

• “…tacking the two letters “db” onto a pile of code that breaks with the traditional relational model.” - Since when does a database need to be relational? Sure, relational databases are the most popular, but they are only a subset of all the possible database types (let’s not forget hierarchical or tuple stores).
• “None of them is right for everyone, and all of them are completely …

UPDATE developer_day_signup
SET name=YOU!
WHERE (attending_mysql_uc=True OR attending_percona_conference=True)
      AND shape_future_database=True;

Alpha version 5.08 of the BLOB streaming engine for MySQL has been released. You can download the source code from www.blobstreaming.org/download. The documentation has also been updated.

What's new in 5.08:

• All PBMS data is stored under a 'pbms' directory in the MySQL server's data directory rather than in the database directories them selves.
• This version now builds with Drizzle and can be loaded as a 'Blobcontainer' plug-in.
• Added the possibility of storing BLOB metadata along with the BLOB in the repository.
• Added the possibility of assigning an alias to a BLOB, which can then be used to retrieve the BLOB instead of using the engine generated URL.
• Added an updateable system table 'pbms_metadata_header' to control which HTTP headers are stored as metadata.
• Added an updateable …

Stopping All Servers
All 221 tests were successful.
The servers were restarted 14 times
Spent 1424.921 of 1521 seconds executing testcases

(All tests have passed on OpenSolaris on x86 for a while now).

Signup now. You know you want to.

It’ll be awesome - we’re all gathering to change the future of databases (okay, well maybe just one database, but it’s the world to us…. and i should get out more).

I was pleased to wake up this morning to find a message from Monty Taylor on my IRC client about how MySQL is working towards a pluggable query cache API:

• http://forge.mysql.com/worklog/task.php?id=4803

Why do I care? well I’ve been talking about a pluggable query cache interface for Drizzle from it’s early days so I was delighted to see that someone else in the world cares too. Here are my blog posts that describes this better:

• Rethinking the Query Cache for Drizzle
• Some Progress in Drizzle’s Pluggable …

We had this plan.

We were going to show off the latest Innodb plugin.

We imported into the tree... got a benchmark and then...

We found a race condition in our code that showed up once we added the new plugin to our code.

Is the plugin faster?

Sure seems to be... but make up your own mind.

You can play with it here: https://edge.launchpad.net/drizzle/trunk/2009.03.962 (which includes Solaris/Sparc support now)

Curious about the numbers? Below is a current run of sysbench from one of our 16core systems. Very soon now Jay will have the public regression system available.

What will it do? Anyone who wants to follow our efforts on performance will be able too.

Want to …

What’s going on at your favorite open-source database developer mailing list? Non-scientific memory of what I’ve been seeing lately:

• The Drizzle list is talking about test coverage and completeness, and schedulers.
• The MySQL internals list has recently been dominated with talk about coding standards.
• The PostgreSQL hackers list is talking about a ton of stuff. I don’t even try to keep up.
• The Percona launchpad list is talking about bugs, xtrabackup, and more bugs and patches for them. There’s also a Percona Google Group …

The MySQL marketplace today is far more complex then simply choosing between a particular version of MySQL that Sun/MySQL produces.
The MySQL server product in general is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v2, however you should carefully review the MySQL Legal Policies as a number of exceptions and different license agreements operate for companion tools such as MySQL Cluster, MySQL client libraries and documentation for example.

Looking into the MySQL ecosystem for products, I’ve produced the following categories:

• Sun/MySQL Official Products
  • MySQL Versions
• MySQL Variants
  • Community
  • Enterprise
  …

Yesterday, Monty and I were fussing around with lcov and genhtml trying to generate code coverage analysis for Drizzle. After a few hours, I was finally able to get some good output, and I've published the results temporarily on my website.

We're currently at 70.4% code coverage which is less-than-ideal, but at least we now have a baseline from which to improve. We're all about making incremental improvements, and having statistics to tell us whether we're going in the right direction is important. This is a good first step.

So, what exactly do these code coverage numbers mean?

OK, so for those readers not familiar with gcov or lcov, here is what these code coverage numbers actually mean... They represent the percentage of executable source lines which are executed during a run of Drizzle's test suite. Basically, the percent gives us a rough idea of the percent of …