Eric Day

Drizzle Developer Day Recap

Last Friday we held the Drizzle Developer Day at the Santa Clara convention center, taking advantage of the fact that many developers and interested contributors were already there for the MySQL Conference & Expo. Minus a few small glitches like wifi and pizza consumption location, I would say it was an overall success. There were a lot of new folks interested in learning about Drizzle and getting the server up and running. The day was organized by splitting folks up into small groups with matching interests, and then switching up groups every hour or so. We had groups focused on replication, documentation, writing plugins, the optimizer, Boots (the new client tool), and a “getting started” group.

The first group I participated in was about Boots, the new command line tool developed by a group of students I sponsored at Portland State University. One of the students who created it was there (Chromakode), so he gave a demo of all the features and ways you could extend it for custom use. Baron from Percona was there and had a lot of good feedback on what is needed by DBAs, as well as for monitoring/troubleshooting problems. Some of the new features in Boots will help quite a bit with this since you are able to write simple Python scripts that work inside the program rather than having to write a bunch of shell processing code around the existing tool. This extended into a discussion about testing tools for production systems, and how to capture and replay production traffic with the same timing and load (or increased load).

The next group I sat in on was around creating plugins. There were topics like getting started with writing your own plugin, a script to generate a skeleton for your own, and more advanced topics like dependency tracking. Since I used the same pandora-plugin system for another project and added dependency tracking there, I am interested in getting dependency tracking into Drizzle. We didn’t get to any code, but this will require some changes in how plugins are loaded in the Drizzle kernel.

I had to leave a little early to catch my flight home, but for the second half of the day I bounced between helping a group get started from scratch (mainly installing dependencies to getting Drizzle built and running) and the other group topics. Thanks to everyone who showed up and helped participate, we all had some great conversations providing valuable feedback for directions to take moving forward.

8 Responses to "Drizzle Developer Day Recap"

1. Karl Scheirer says:

   April 19, 2010 at 7:36 pm

   Hey Eric,

   Thanks for the recap! I saw you went to PDX last year – how close is Drizzle to being usable for a Drupal install?
2. Eric Day says:

   April 19, 2010 at 7:45 pm

   Hi Karl,

   I think it’s fairly close since we support the MySQL protocol now. The existing MySQL backend may work with a few tweaks for anything that uses MySQL specific syntax. It would be interesting to see Drupal and Drizzle installed to see if it “just works”, and if not, which queries need to be modified.
3. drizzle.org says:

   April 20, 2010 at 1:32 pm

   [...] a very successful Drizzle Developer Day last Friday right after the MySQL user conference Check out Eric’s blog for a quick [...]
4. Ronald Bradford says:

   April 20, 2010 at 3:33 pm

   Hi Karl,

   I’m definitely interested in working with the Drupal community on Drizzle integration. My last detailed discussion with a number of key Drupal people at OSCON was the lack of a PDO driver for Drizzle.

   I’m no good with knowing the protocol and interface inter-dependencies, Eric is definitely the best, but I’m happy to help with the Drizzle specifics at the DB level.

   Regards

   Ronald (me @ )
5. Summary of Drizzle Developer Day | Weez.com says:

   April 20, 2010 at 4:09 pm

   [...] a very successful Drizzle Developer Day last Friday right after the MySQL user conference Check out Eric’s blog for a quick [...]
6. Log Buffer #186, a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs | The Pythian Blog says:

   April 23, 2010 at 3:03 pm

   [...] Stuart Smith posts Ramblings about Storage Engine API: write_row, CREATE SELECT, and DDL. And Eric Day recaps Drizzle Developer Day. [...]
7. Pythian Group: Log Buffer #186, a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs | Weez.com says:

   April 23, 2010 at 4:09 pm

   [...] Stuart Smith posts Ramblings about Storage Engine API: write_row, CREATE SELECT, and DDL. And Eric Day recaps Drizzle Developer Day. [...]
8. Eric Day: Drizzle Developer Day Recap | Weez.com says:

   May 4, 2010 at 4:08 pm

   [...] View full post on Planet Drizzle [...]

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