The latest from the MySQL community

Thanks to everyone who came out for the Gearman and libdrizzle talks at the MySQL Confrence & Expo and the Percona Performance Conference! Links to the slides are provided below:

• The Return of Gearman (Percona)
• libdrizzle: A New Client Library for Drizzle and MySQL (MySQL)
• Map/Reduce and Queues for MySQL Using Gearman (MySQL)

If you want to learn more about Gearman, be sure to check out gearman.org or the upcoming 3-hour tutorial or …

I’m wrapping up some Gearman work and packing for the users conference, it should be fun and exciting! I thought I’d send out a reminder that Brian and I will be talking about Gearman at both the MySQL UC and Percona Performance conference, including the possibility of a new release of Gearman. Here’s a hint:

lap> ./gearmand/gearmand -vv -t 4
Starting up
Initializing libevent for main thread
Method for libevent: epoll
Trying to listen on 0.0.0.0:4730
Listening on 0.0.0.0:4730
Creating wakeup pipe
Creating 4 threads
Initializing libevent for IO thread
Creating IO thread wakeup pipe
Thread 1 created
[   1] Entering thread event loop
Initializing …

Over the past couple days I’ve been tearing through the network I/O code inside of Drizzle. I moved anything that touched NET into the Protocol class (reading commands, preferences, error checking) and wrapped them with new Protocol methods. I then moved the NET structure out of Session (or THD for the MySQL folks) and into Protocol. At this point all network I/O was going through Protocol, which allowed me to do a proper abstraction layer with the old libdrizzle as a derived implementation class. The next step was to add in a new plugin hook for Protocol, and move the old libdrizzle implementation into a plugin. Since the server is the only thing using the old libdrizzle, all of that code also went into the plugin (note: this means the final death of old libdrizzle!). So now each new connection grabs a Protocol object from the default registered Protocol plugin and Session will use this anytime it …

Good news! If you want to learn more about Gearman, you’ll have plenty of opportunities in the coming months:

• Percona Performance Conference 2009: The Return of Gearman
• MySQL Conference & Expo 2009: Map/Reduce and Queues for MySQL using Gearman
• MySQL Conference & Expo 2009: Gearman at the DotOrg pavillion, come visit our booth!
• OSCON 2009: Gearman: Bringing the Power of Map/Reduce to Everyday Applications (session)
• OSCON 2009: …

I’m pleased to announce three Gearman releases today! They are:

• Gearman C Server and Library - This includes changes to support new part of the protocol, a new Gearman command line tool, and a few other bug fixes and cleanup. Note: This now installs ‘gearmand’ into your preferred ’sbin’ directory, so if you are upgrading be sure to remove the old one from ‘bin’
• Gearman PHP Extension - This is a brand new PHP extension that wraps the C library to provide PHP with a faster client and worker interface. See the README file and the exampes directory for instructions and how to use it.
• Gearman MySQL UDF - New version of …

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 …

This Sunday I’ll be flying down to the bay area for my final week of work at Concentric. The following week I’ll be starting as a full-time Drizzle/Gearman developer with Sun Microsystems. This was the position Brian Aker mentioned back in January.

Over nine years ago I was flying to the bay area for my job interview at Concentric. It’s been a great run and I’ve learned a tremendous amount there, writing everything from customized, multi-threaded HTTP and DNS servers to a clustered, hierarchical object database with a full query language. The environment at Concentric feels like a family, probably because a number of co-workers have been there even longer than me. It was a tough decision to make, and I …

Thanks to those of you who came to listen in on the webinar. I’ve posted the slides here if you want them. If you have any follow-up questions, check out #gearman on irc.freenode.net.

Living in Portland, OR, I was sad to see O’Reilly move OSCON to San Jose this year (don’t they have enough with MySQL, Velocity, …?). So what did the Portland locals do? Start their own:

Open Source Bridge (we have a lot of bridges here in Portland).

It looks like they just opened up their call for papers recently, quoting from their page: “Open Source Bridge is accepting proposals now through March 31st for our 2009 conference, which will take place June 17–19 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, OR.”

Tomorrow I’m going to be giving a free webinar on Gearman through MySQL. I’ll be describing the basics of Gearman and then look at a few common use cases. I’ll even be touching on some more advanced topics such as Map/Reduce and persistent queues.

Click here to sign up now!