[something happened to this post and I am reposting it]
It was suggested by Monty that the posts I've made about MariaDB are for publicity. This simply isn't true. I would have much preferred a different outcome in my interactions with MariaDB. I figured that they would end up giving me a hard time, and I'd be stubborn and we'd both hate each other for as long as I could keep from leaving. A quick separation actually seems much better in such context. Regardless, I would have preferred to speak amicably to the MariaDB Corporation about switching the license back, or at least moving to the new license at the time of the notification of the community, ie, changing the license so that bug fixes for 1.3.4 were not mingled with new 2.0 features.

It could have been easily possible to have a 1.3.5 release that fixes the major bugs in 1.3 and then release a new set of features as 2.0. This would have been at least reasonable, but by …

OPEN SOURCE IS ABOUT BEING OPEN NOT JUST ABOUT SOURCE CODE.
MariaDB makes changes to the storage engine API without even consulting the mailing list. In fact, some MariaDB replication features don't work with TokuDB because a new storage engine API call is required, and this call requires functionality that might not exist in all engines, that is, the engine must be able to convert a transaction id into a THD object. No API is provided by the SE to make this translation. MariaDB must communicate changes to the storage API to the public so that the public can ensure that tools made to work with MariaDB continue to work with MariaDB. It doesn't matter that TokuDB is made by a competitor. In a foreign language article, Kaj recently said MariaDB is more open than Oracle because it includes many storage engines. This is a crappy argument. MariaDB is trying to say they are better than Oracle because they profit more from including code they didn't …

(This article is based on the work of my colleage Herald van der Breggen. The "I" and "my" below refer to him)

At work, we have a large Perl application running to earn our keep. To read data from MySQL into perl application, there are a few ways to do that, and we wanted to compare performance of these methods.

• HandlerSocket, a NoSQL interfaceus, using Net::HandlerSocket) (columns selectable)
• DBI, the standard Perl database interface (using DBD::mysql underneath) (columns selectable).
• HANDLER DBI, DBI queries, using HANDLER statements instead of SELECT statements. See HANDLER Syntax (full rows only).
• Class::DBI, an ORM …

Welcome to this week’s edition of “Last Week in Drizzle”.  As an introduction this week I would like to quote John David Duncan’s recent Facebook post: “And what’s in the weather forecast for next week? Drizzle.”.  Yes, our first GA release is due next week, does that mean the development pace has slowed?  Heck no!  Over 150,000 lines of bzr diff in the trunk since last week and quite a few branches still in the merge queue going through our extensive regression testing system.

Google Summer of Code

We have once again applied to be part of the Google Summer of Code program.  We had some great students last year and some new faces interested in being students on projects for Drizzle have already started taking on some low-hanging-fruit tasks to get them used to our code and processes.  We will have a sign-up form up soon so that anyone interested in being part of the program which I …

Welcome to this week's edition of "Last Week in Drizzle".  As an introduction this week I would like to quote John David Duncan's recent Facebook post: "And what's in the weather forecast for next week? Drizzle.".  Yes, our first GA release is due next week, does that mean the development pace has slowed?  Heck no!  Over 150,000 lines of bzr diff in the trunk since last week and quite a few branches still in the merge queue going through our extensive regression testing system.
Google Summer of Code
We have once again applied to be part of the Google Summer of Code program.  We had some great students last year and some new faces interested in being students on projects for Drizzle have already started taking on some low-hanging-fruit tasks to get them used to our code and processes.  We will have a sign-up form up soon so that anyone interested in being part of the program which I will blog about when …

In The Doom Of Multiple Storage Engines, PeterZ lists a number of unique technological challenges that MySQL has to face precisely because it chooses Storage Engines and the way it implements them.

There is another, nontechnical challenge that needs solving by vendors that are producing commercial closed source storage engines for MySQL - my experience is with one specific vendor, but the situation is basically the same for each and every closed source SE:

Where I work, we are a MySQL support customer. Actually, we are a very satisfied MySQL support customer, because in our opinion the MySQL support just plain rocks and has more than once saved our corporate asses, or at least greatly improved our MySQL experience.

If we were to load a closed source storage engine into our MySQL binaries, we would make life …

This Thursday (March 4th, 15:00 UTC - slightly later than usual), Robin Schumacher will present MySQL Column Databases. If you're doing Data Warehouse with your databases this is a must-attend, but it's also interesting to learn what typical other scenarios there are for using column-based storage engines, and how column databases work in the first place.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser to this page. You need a browser with a working Flash plugin. You may register for a Dimdim account, but you don't have to. (Dimdim is the conferencing system we're using for MySQL University sessions. It provides integrated voice streaming, chat, whiteboard, session recording, …

This Thursday (March 4th, 15:00 UTC - slightly later than usual), Robin Schumacher will present MySQL Column Databases. If you're doing Data Warehouse with your databases this is a must-attend, but it's also interesting to learn what typical other scenarios there are for using column-based storage engines, and how column databases work in the first place.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser to this page. You need a browser with a working Flash plugin. You may register for a Dimdim account, but you don't have to. (Dimdim is the conferencing system we're using for MySQL University sessions. It provides integrated voice streaming, chat, whiteboard, session recording, …

This Thursday (March 4th, 15:00 UTC - slightly later than usual), Robin Schumacher will present MySQL Column Databases. If you're doing Data Warehouse with your databases this is a must-attend, but it's also interesting to learn what typical other scenarios there are for using column-based storage engines, and how column databases work in the first place.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser to this page. You need a browser with a working Flash plugin. You may register for a Dimdim account, but you don't have to. (Dimdim is the conferencing system we're using for MySQL University sessions. It provides integrated voice streaming, chat, whiteboard, session recording, …

MySQL 5.1.24-rc ships with a EXAMPLE storage engine which is basically a dummy storage engine and serves as a useful source to start writing your own custom storage engine.

However, it is not available for use, by default. You can verify this as follows:

mysql> show engines;

+------------+---------+-----------------------------------------------------------+--------------+----+------------+ | Engine     | Support | Comment                                                   | Transactions | XA | Savepoints | +------------+---------+-----------------------------------------------------------+--------------+----+------------+ | …