Colin Charles Agenda

RethinkDB is all the rage today, as its a Y Combinator funded startup, which also launched a developer pre-alpha today. So what is RethinkDB you ask? Yet-another-MySQL-storage-engine, that’s what. But this time, its tuned for solid-state drives (SSDs), which also happen to be all the rage these days.

Anyway, check them out more, and the materials currently tell me that they’re using append-only algorithms, which allow for live schema changes and hot backups, with instantaneous recovery from power failure. Those are just some of the exciting bits.

What didn’t excite me so much was the fact that you were only getting 32-bit or 64-bit Linux binaries, built against MySQL 5.1.31 and you’ll just install it via the INSTALL PLUGIN option. But they are trying to get some semblance of a community growing, with their getting involved page, filled with some papers, as well as a support mailing list (I see Mark Callaghan is already busy asking them questions). And of course you can follow them on their blog, or on Twitter. All this without source ;-)

One of the developers also confirmed that they’re adding “features required by WordPress so we could eat our own dogfood”. They haven’t started profiling (much yet?), and they’ve probably got ways to go on performance. Seems like “getting it working for WordPress”, is slowly becoming a good testing ground – Jeff Waugh did so for WordPress and Drizzle, too.

Anyway, it seems like its time to get some SSDs, as we start seeing things like this pop up. RethinkDB will also face another problem for mass adoption – how many hosting providers are using SSDs? Probably not many (if at all).

Have you tried RethinkDB? Your thoughts?

We had 12 projects, and by the time we’ve hit mid-terms, we’ve decided to cull 2 project so far, leaving us with 10 projects.

This year, the MySQL project can really divide itself into three groups – those hacking on MySQL, Drizzle, or phpMyAdmin. Next year, will we see others? I certainly hope so…

Drizzle – Padraig O’Sullivan is doing an excellent job at working on a new implementation of the INFORMATION_SCHEMA. Nathan Williams is doing great work at code cleanup for Drizzle, and making it conform to C++ standards. Jiangfeng Peng is hacking on batch nested loop join’s in Drizzle.

phpMyAdmin – Derek Schaefer is adding import improvements to phpMyAdmin, while Tomas Srnka is working on adding MySQL Replication support for phpMyAdmin (and impressing his mentor!). Zahra Naeem is working on change tracking of data/structures, and you’d expect some more work after the mid-term, once some problems are worked through.

MySQL – Joseph Lukas is working on new commands to allow the changing of session variables temporarily as needed in a query. Haihao Tang is working on WL#4034, which is focused around the I_S storage engine. Tulay Meuzzinoglu is working on an SQL optimiser for mod_ndb, and there’s a lot of good stuff already going into the codebase, as is.

Common problems? Timezones and language barriers. How do other open source projects deal with this?

Much thanks to all the mentors who are doing a great job! If you want to keep track, either watch the individual Launchpad accounts, or check out the summer of code list for weekly progress reports

Brian Aker was at the Sun booth today, in a premier slot, where there must have been about 50-60 people, huddled around, to listen to him talk about Drizzle. The project motivations, what’s behind it, what its not aimed to be, and so much more. Check the video out (21 minutes long)!

The Birds of a Feather (BoF) session in the night, was well attended, and there was lots of large discussion on what’s next. I think the important message to take away is that Drizzle doesn’t aim to be MySQL, and there are no plans to “merge” things back (fixes where the code-base is shared though, might make sense). Its also important that the design is for the future, i.e. multi-core machines. It was great to see Brian say that this really leverages Sun in many ways.

Its worth noting that Sheeri was at the lightning talk, and has a shorter, 8 minute video recording too.
Update: s/nothing/noting

Silona Bonewald, the lady always in a hat (she says that it’s just become an extension of her). Describe her, by her tags: open government, open data, open standards, and databases.

(watch the video if your feed reader strips it out)

Silona’s the founder of The League of Technical Voters, which allows technical people to be more involved in voting process. As part of this, she created the Transparent Federal Budget, with Bill Bradley and Jimmy Wales.

On top of all that, she’s also the open source evangelist for grid.org. The focus there is a social network for grid, cluster, and cloud computing folk – a community of communities. Best of all, this was just launched on Tuesday!

It’s also the home to UniCluster, and they’ve recently struck a deal which Intel to pop UniCluster in BIOSes. UniCluster works with Sun’s Grid Engine, as well.

She’s interested in Drizzle, for the same reason that she likes Drupal. She likes the decorator model, and she thinks its a great way to get the parallel computing solutions fixed.

Needless to say, all of the stuff she works on currently, is powered by MySQL.

Interested in MySQL? Drizzle? How the Sun acquisition is going for MySQL? Listen to Brian, Monty, and Tim speak about this, at the OSCON panel. Watch the video, its 20+ minutes, it starts off a bit shaky (oops), but I’m mostly happy with the rest. Enjoy.