Last week at the Drizzle developer day a few people were surprised at the number of plugin interfaces we’ve created already. I created this image to give a sampling of interfaces and plugins:

As you can see, things are quite different from MySQL.

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.”