If your storage engine returns an error from rnd_init (or doStartTableScan as it’s named in Drizzle) and does not save this error and return it in any subsequent calls to rnd_next, your engine is buggy. Namely it is buggy in that a) an error may not be reported back to the user and b) everything may explode horribly when rnd_next is called after rnd_init returned an error.

Unless it is running on MariaDB 5.2 or (soon, when the patch hits the tree) Drizzle.

Monty (Widenius, not Taylor) wrote a patch for MariaDB based on my bug …

Okay… So I’ve blogged many times before about the Storage Engine API in Drizzle. This API is somewhat inherited from MySQL. We have very much attempted to make it a much cleaner interface. Our goals in making changes include: make it much easier to write and maintain a storage engine, make the upper layer code obviously correct and clear in what it’s doing and being able to more easily introduce optimisations.

I’ve recently added a Storage Engine that is only used in testing: storage_engine_api_tester. I’ve blogged on it producing call graphs (really state transition graphs) before both for Storage Engine and Cursor.

I’ve been expanding the test. My test engine is now a wrapper around a real engine instead of just a fake one. …

Drizzle still has a number of quirks inherited from the MySQL Storage Engine API (e.g. BLOBs, row buffer, CREATE SELECT and lack of DDL transaction boundaries, key tuple format). One of the things we fixed a long time ago was to have proper methods for StorageEngines to be called for: startTransaction, startStatement, endStatement, commit and rollback.

If you’ve had to implement a transactional storage engine in MySQL you will be well aware of the pattern of “in every …

Here’s another bit of the API you may need to use in your storage engine (it also seems to be a rather unknown. I believe the only place where this has really been documented is ha_ndbcluster.cc, so here goes….

Drizzle (through inheritance from MySQL) has its own (in memory) row format (it could be said that it has several, but we’ll ignore that for the moment for sanity). This is used inside the server for a number of things. When writing a Storage Engine all you really need to know is that you’re expected to write these into your engine and return them from your engine.

The row buffer format itself is kind-of documented (in that it’s mentioned in the MySQL Internals documentation) but everywhere that’s …

Here’s something that’s not really documented anywhere (unless you count ha_innodb.cc as a source of server documentation). You may have some idea about the MySQL/Drizzle row buffer format. This is passed around the storage engine interface: in for write_row and update_row and out for the various scan and index read methods.

If you want to see the docs for it that exist in the code, check out store_key_val_for_row in ha_innodb.cc.

However, there is another format that is passed to your engine (and that your engine is expected to understand) and for lack of a better name, I’m going to call it the key tuple format. The first place you’ll probably see this is when implementing the index_read function for a Cursor (or handler in MySQL speak).

You get two things: a pointer to the buffer and the length of the buffer. Since a key can be made up of multiple parts, some of which can be NULL and some of which can be of …

As anybody who has ever implemented a Storage Engine for MySQL will know, a bunch of the DDL calls got passed a parameter named “path”. This was a filesystem path. Depending on what platform you were running, it may contain / or \ (and no, it’s not consistent on each platform). Add to that the difference if you were creating temporary tables (table name of #sql_somethingsomething) and the difference if you were one of the two (built in) engines that were able to be used for creating internal temporary tables (temp tables that are created during query execution that do not belong in a schema). Well… you had a bit of a mess.

My earlier attempts involved splitting everything up into two strings: schema name and table name. This ended badly. The final architecture we decided on was to have an object passed around that would deal with various transformations (from what the user entered to …

I am rather excited about being able to do awesome things such as this to get the current configuration of your server:

drizzle> SELECT NAME,VALUE
    -> FROM DATA_DICTIONARY.INNODB_CONFIGURATION
    ->  WHERE NAME IN ("data_file_path", "data_home_dir");
+----------------+-------+
| NAME           | VALUE |
+----------------+-------+
| data_file_path | NULL  |
| data_home_dir  | ./    |
+----------------+-------+
2 rows in set (0 sec)

drizzle> SELECT NAME,VALUE
    -> FROM DATA_DICTIONARY.INNODB_CONFIGURATION
    -> WHERE NAME IN ("data_file_path", "data_home_dir");
+----------------+-------+
| NAME           | VALUE |
+----------------+-------+
| data_file_path | NULL  |
| data_home_dir  | ./    |
+----------------+-------+
2 rows in set (0 sec)

drizzle> SELECT NAME,VALUE
    -> FROM DATA_DICTIONARY.INNODB_CONFIGURATION
    -> WHERE NAME = "io_capacity";
+-------------+-------+
| NAME        | VALUE | …

The DDL code paths for Drizzle are increasingly different from MySQL. For example, the embedded_innodb StorageEngine CREATE TABLE code path is completely different than what it would have to be for MySQL. This is because of a number of reasons, the primary one being that Drizzle uses a protobuf message to describe the table format instead of several data structures and a FRM file.

We are pretty close to having the table protobuf message format being final (there’s a few bits left to clean up, but expect them done Real Soon Now (TM)). You can see the definition (which is pretty simple to follow) in drizzled/message/table.proto. Also check out my series of blog posts on the table message …