It’s the FRM file format version number.

It’s not the version of the table as one might expect (i.e. after CREATE it’s 1. Then, if you ALTER, it’s 2. Alter again 3 etc).

In Drizzle, we now return 0.

In future, I plan that Drizzle will allow the engine to say what version it is (where 0 is “dunno”).

This’ll be a good step towards being able to cope with multiple versions of a table in use at once (and making sense of this to the user).

So… in removing the FRM file in Drizzle, I found a bit of a nugget on how drop table works (currently in the MySQL server and now “did” in Drizzle).

If you DROP TABLE t1; this is what happens

• open the .frm file
• read first 10bytes (oh, and if you get EIO there, in a SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES you’ll get “Error” instead of “Base Table”)
• if (header[0] != (unsigned char) 254 || header[1] != 1 ||
  (header[2] != FRM_VER && header[2] != FRM_VER+1 &&
  (header[2] < FRM_VER+3 || header[2] > FRM_VER+4)))
  return true;
  Which means that you probably (well, should have) set your enum legacy_db_type to DB_TYPE_UNKNOWN in the caller of bool mysql_frm_type(Session *, char *path, enum legacy_db_type *dbt) otherwise you end up in some form of pain.
• Else, *dbt= (enum legacy_db_type) (uint) *(header + 3);
  return …

Brian, Monty, Stewart, Lee and myself sat down yesterday and fleshed out the blueprint tasks that we are targeting for the Cirrus milestone. This marks the first time we've made a concerted effort to really determine the tasks which are of essential importance in moving towards Drizzle's first release. Before I detail some of the major tasks, I'd like to make a quick recognition of our contributor community.

Although the MySQL server does have community contributions in some of the releases, the Cirrus milestone marks something of a new day in …

Open SQL Camp was a success.

It was hosted by Baron "Xaprb" Schwartz, who I learned is one of the few people I don't have to look down to look in the eye.

There were maybe 100 people over the whole the weekend, including the upper echalon of MySQL and other open source database hackers, as well as technical people from Infobright and Tokutek and PBXT.

There were people who quite literally flew in from the other side of the planet and from Europe.

It was good to see Monty Widenius, and to introduce him to the pleasure that is well made matcha.

Vadim Tkachenko's and Peter Zaitsev's presentation on the Percona patches was interesting and eye opening. The following random roundtable discussion between them, Brian Aker of Drizzle, and Arjen Lentz about the open source future of InnoDB was productive, in that it let to Percona moving their patch set development to Launchpad …

On friday we released the second Beta version of PBXT. PBXT is a transactional storage engine for MySQL 5.1 and 6.0. You can find out more about the engine at www.primebase.org.

PBXT is pluggable, so it can be built separately from the MySQL tree, and loaded dynamically at runtime using the LOAD PLUGIN statement.

You can download PBXT from here. A "quick guide" to building and installing the plugin is provided. I have also updated the documentation for this version.

There are no major new features in this release because we are working towards the RC version in December. But we wrote some release notes to prove we have been busy :)

There is now also a version of PBXT available for …

Bazaar branches of libmallocfail

Simple LD_PRELOAD library that will take parameters via environment variables and cause malloc() to occationally fail.

Aim was to use this to test bits of MySQL/Drizzle although since their libtool based stuf, the binary in tree is a libtool shell script, and I haven’t found a way to LD_PRELOAD only for mysqld and not the shell script and the other processes spawned by it.

I have found a bug in libc though :)

Since before MySQL was MySQL, there has been the .FRM file. Of course, what it really wanted to be was “.form” -  a file that stored how to display a form on your (green) CRT. Jan blogged earlier in the year on this still being there, even in MySQL 5.1 (albeit not in any useful form).

So why do we want it to die?

Well… it’s not exactly very useful anymore.

There are a few things it’s used for….

If database/table.frm exists, the table exists (or, on Windows, you may also get database\table.frm). This is tested in a few bits in the code by a call to access(2).

Most engines have their own data dictionaries (Innodb, PBXT, NDB, Falcon). Keeping these in sync with the FRMs can be problematic at best. This is especially true with distributed engines such as NDB.

The current solution is …

The past 3 years, 11 months I have worked full time on NDB (MySQL Cluster). It’s been awesome. Love the product and people. In the time I’ve been on the Cluster team, we’ve gone from a small group that would easily fit in the (old old) Stockholm office to one that requires large rooms to house us all in. It’s also been all about smart people (you have to be to work on a distributed database).

With MySQL Cluster 6.4 we’re getting in a bunch of features that have been on the “wide adoption” wishlist. With each release of NDB we’ve gained a wedge of applications that can be used with it - and 6.4 is no exception.

One of the biggest things that’s been worked on is multithreaded data nodes. If you check out Jonas‘ recent posts on 500,000 …

Open-Xchange raises Series B funding. The FSF enables Wikimedia’s potential move to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. The “Bilski” decision and software patents. Mindtouch reports revenue growth. And more.

Press releases
Open-Xchange Closes Series B Venture Funding of $9 Million Open-Xchange

OASIS Members Form Committee to Advance Interoperability and Conformance of OpenDocument Format (ODF) Applications OASIS

FSF Releases New Version of GNU Free Documentation License Free Software Foundation

Federal Court Issues “Bilski” Decision Software Freedom …

The InnoDB plugin is now merged into the Drizzle mainline. There is still one weird outstanding bug that I know of. Why is this exciting? The main things found in the plugin that I’m excited about are:

• New compressed table format.
• Adding or dropping indexes can now bypass the table copy
• Information Schema plugins with InnoDB internals data

Not to mention, something tells me that the plugin will be getting more dev attention, and should be easier to track moving forward.

I’ve been doing my best to make the changes in such a way that they could be potentially merged back into the plugin upstream, should Oracle care to. (which I hope they will)

       …