It just goes to show that code isn’t the only way to contribute. Mike Shadle recently did some leg work the Drizzle world by not only fronting the domain cost for drizzle.org, but also in actually negotiating down the guy who owned it already. That being done, the time has come (if you’re so inclined) to chip in and help defray Mike’s out-of-pocket.

The goal is to raise roughly $1000 USD to cover the domain + Escrow costs. I’ve already said I would contribute a chunk of that. Please include in the PayPal description your full name/company/whatever identifying information you’d like and if you’d like it recorded, and I will record it and if the Drizzle guys wish, we can post your info on the [not established yet] website as a Drizzle supporter.

If you’ve got an extra few buck lying around, please feel free to …

Whoops, I've gone a little AWOL from the various OSS/Danga/MySQL/Drizzle/etc communities. Well, rest assured I'm down but not out!

I will be attending, and (might? should?) be speaking about DPM and database protocols at the Open SQL Camp in VA mid-november. As well as submitting papers for the next years' round of conferences.

One of my many obsessions is Brian's Drizzle project. Due to time constraints I've been unable to contribute significant code so far, but I did chip in for an awesomely appropriate domain name. Not going to say how much I sent in, but mike was cool enough to front the whole cost, so if you like drizzle please pitch in what you can!

In my work this week on the new test automation framework for Drizzle, I have realized that the existing MySQL test suite is in bad need of a spring (southern hemisphere) cleaning. Actually, to be clear, it's not the test runner (tests/test-run.pl and client/drizzletest.cc) which needs spring cleaning, but the tests themselves. While I have made some improvements to the runner itself, to make it more extensible and easier to understand, it is the tests themselves which represent MySQL's version of Pompeii, the Italian city buried underneath the ash of Mt. Vesuvius.

Like the bodies underneath the piles of ash in Pompeii, many of the individual tests in the MySQL test suite are frozen in time.

In a way, this is understandable, for a few reasons. …

Antony points out:

Unfortunately, I had to work with the limitations of the C programming language and its preprocessor so to achieve a solution which behaved as if it had the strong typing like generics but working with simple C;

Yeah, I started out ranting about that whole system too, but decided against it since I knew the real culprit was, as is usual, requirements. I do not envy the task of implementing C++ generics in preprocessor macros. (I do look forward to going and reading the worklog though)

As Antony suggests, I am speaking in the context of Drizzle, which means I’m speaking from the vantage point of having change the underlying assumptions. We use C++ fully in Drizzle. So whereas in MySQL this code is, as Antony says, performing properly (quite amazingly well, actually) in Drizzle …

The following comment:

/* the following declarations are for internal use only */

is about 35% of the way down drizzled/plugin.h. How about:

If it’s for internal use only - DONT PUT IT IN A HEADER FILE!!!!!!!!! At least not a header file that’s used by things.

I would like to add two follow up thoughts to yesterday’s post about Free Software.

First, I was speaking with giuseppe on IRC who said:

however, the economy of free software goes beyond passion. You can make money with services, as you have done, personally, for years!

Giuseppe is, as usual, right on. I hope I did not imply that I thought it was impossible to make money or to make a living around Free Software, or that to endeavor to do such a thing was folly. What I was trying to get at is that pursuing the writing of software with the goal of becoming rich was a bad idea. It might happen, but if it does it will likely be due to luck.

I am currently paid by Sun Microsystems to write Free Software. I am thrilled about that, and think Sun are wonderful for supporting me. I would also love to have some chunk of Free Software that I write make me rich - but neither my employment by …

I’d say I normally don’t respond to idiots… but I think we all know that’s a lie. Our fine friends at Slashdot pointed out an “interesting” article which opines that the downturning Economy to Give Open-Source a Good Thumping. There’s a bit in the middle that points out that people still don’t get it.

The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren’t going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some “back end” revenue. “Free” doesn’t fill anyone’s belly; it doesn’t warm anyone up.

The disconnect seems to continue to be an idea that we’re doing the Free Software in hopes that it might turn a profit one day. The people who share this disconnect seem to think Free Software is a “gimmick” of some sort.

What is the future of Drizzle? What sort of assumptions are you making?

Hardware

On the hardware front I get a lot of distance saying "the future is 64bit, multi-core, and runs on SSD". This is a pretty shallow answer, and is pretty obvious to most everyone. It suits a sound bite but it is not really that revolutionary of a thought. To me the real question is "how do we use them".

64bit means you have to change the way you code. Memory is now flat for the foreseeable future. Never focus on how to map around 32bit issues and always assume you have a large, flat, memory space available. Spend zero time thinking about 32bit.

If you are thinking "multi-core" then think about it massively. Right now adoption is at the 16 core point, which means that if you are developing software today, you need to be thinking about multiples of 16. I …

I've ported my AWS S3 storage engine to Drizzle.

The source is at bzr branch lp:~fallenpegasus/drizzle/awss3. Pull it and build it like you would the main Drizzle. The engine is built-in, no need to plugin load it.

Example use:

   CREATE TABLE colors
     (nam VARCHAR(32) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY, val BLOB)
        ENGINE='AWSS3'
        CONNECTION='awss3 bucket_name aws_id aws_secret';
   SELECT val FROM colors WHERE nam='BlueViolet';

I will try to keep it tracking the main Drizzle dev tree.

krow asked for two more plugin types for Drizzle: Scheduler (which allocates and controls threads, and assigns them to sessions), and (drumroll), Parser.

People have been asking for plugin parsing for MySQL for years.

Drizzle is about to get it.

:)