Friday 25 February 2011

Last Week in Drizzle

Welcome to the second edition of Last Week in Drizzle.  The diff of the trunk between last Friday and right now is just under 23,000 lines in size, so I will do my best to summarise the important parts of this.

Replication


A lot of great work has gone into solidifying replication this week.  The slave code has not been merged yet since it has been triggering bugs in the Solaris compiler (see further down this post) but we plan to have it included in the next few hours ready for RC2.  For a quick summary of our current progress I turn to Patrick Crews:

"In our testing, we create a master-slave setup, then run the transaction log tests that we have been using since we first started beating on the trx log.

There are a variety of different grammars that produce transactions (autocommit=off) and single queries (with autocommit=on).  The various grammars produce different levels of valid queries - some make more valid queries and produce more deadlocks in multi-threaded testing, others create invalid queries to test how the log handles bad input.  We test with simple scenarios like 100 cycles and 1 thread, then move on to more complex tests like 10000 cycles and 10 threads as well as setup 1 million cycle tests to stress the server long-term.

There are still bugs to be found, but we can say with confidence that basic replication, even in highly concurrent / high stress (lots of deadlocks, rollbacks, and good commits) scenarios is working well.  Data is replicated correctly and that is HUGE!

We'll now be moving onto other tests like different configurations (master + slave restarts and crashes, adding a slave to a populated master, KILLing queries, etc)."

More information about setting up replication can be found in Patrick's blog post and David Shrewsbury will have a blog post on it shortly.  Documentation on the docs site will be coming soon.

Race to GA


Our RC2 release is due for tagging on the 28th of February which will include the stabilised replication code.  So the release schedule as last week is:

RC1 - 14th February 2011 Released
RC2 - 28th February 2011
GA - 14th March 2011

BOOLEAN data type


There has been a slight change to the output of the new native BOOLEAN data type.  In the first RC release the MySQL client API returned this as the varchar 'TRUE' or 'FALSE'.  Unfortunately some languages such as PHP and Python did not handle this too well, so thanks to Monty Taylor we now call this TINYINT on the wire for MySQL protocol and return 0 and 1.  Our command line utilities know when they are connecting to Drizzle instead of MySQL and will do the conversion to 'TRUE' or 'FALSE' when displaying output.

Docs day


Wednesday 23rd was our documentation day and I would like to thank everyone who took the time to read through the docs and make suggestions and fixes.  Since Wednesday morning the diff of the docs directory in trunk is just under 4500 lines in size and there are plenty more changes on their way based on the feedback gained.  I'd also like to thank Marisa Plumb, our main documentation writer, for all her hard work so far.

BIT operators


Brian Aker has (by popular demand) added back the SQL bit operators that MySQL has into Drizzle, this includes bit shifting operators.

Message verboseness


Brian has also added a new option to drizzled to set how verbose the output messages should be, defaulting to ERROR only.  More information can be found in the mailing list.

Solaris Jenkins Slave


We have hit several bugs in the Solaris compiler in the last week, Monty Taylor has been fire-fighting this but for now our Jenkins Solaris slave is not creating working builds.  This does mean that there is a chance that RC2 won't be fully tested on Solaris when released.

PHP module


I have been working with the PECL guys to get the Drizzle module working again.  The current release will not compile with the libdrizzle inside Drizzle.  The fix for this has been pushed to the SVN trunk in PECL and we are looking to generate a release of this soon.  In the mean time, the mysql and mysqli PHP connectors work great with Drizzle.

I have also received a lot of feedback from the PHP community that many of them use PDO for database connections.  We currently have no PDO module so I am working on writing one which hopefully will be ready for testing in the next week.

Final Thoughts


A massive amount of bug fixes and improvements have gone into the trunk ready for RC2, including many code clean-ups from Olaf van der Spek who is a new contributor to Drizzle.  I for one am looking forward to a very exciting GA release.

As always if you have any feedback or topics you would like me to cover, please let me know.

5 comments:

  1. [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by planetmysql, Drizzle DB Project. Drizzle DB Project said: Last Week in Drizzle - http://www.linuxjedi.co.uk/?p=102 [...]

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  2. Featurewise, what are the major features missing in drizzle when compared to mysql (assuming that they will be implemented)? Will drizzle support xml querying such as mysql has it?

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  3. Hi Pavel,

    It is difficult to compare MySQL and Drizzle with features. MySQL has some features we don't have, and Drizzle has quite a few features MySQL doesn't have. Also many features are implemented differently in Drizzle to MySQL. If I wrote a feature comparison document it would easily turn into a book in size.

    For better or worse we are not MySQL, nearly 3 years of development has meant that Drizzle is very different internally to MySQL. We do have similar client applications though and speak MySQL protocol by default.

    The XML stuff in particular isn't in Drizzle but could be added without too much difficulty should there be demand for it. Having said that I believe the MySQL client does some of the work and the MySQL client can talk to the Drizzle server.

    Hope this helps

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  4. [...] you want the latest and greatest Drizzle news, we highly recommend LinuxJedi's Last Week in Drizzle [...]

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  5. [...] the trx_log grammars.  I’ll point you to my superhuman colleague, Andrew Hutchings for a summary of what they [...]

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