I’m going and stealing Jay’s idea (who stole it off Brian Duff… but his was for Oracle so obviously doesn’t count :)
So, my five wishes for MySQL Are:
5. Six-monthly release cycles
Getting a release out there takes way too long. There’s a variety of reasons, but seeing the amazing success of other free software projects taking the shorter release cycle, with each release not being too ambitious, I’m pretty convinced.
Although I think our increased use of pushbuild has helped immensely with the general quality of the tree, there’s a lot more that can be done…
4. Much more in depth automated testing
For MySQL Cluster we have (in parts) an insanely detailed test suite… lots of error injection to test failure (or, more importantly, recovery), verifying data, transactional consistency etc. Also, tests that run multiple connections, threads, simultaneous transactions and test the results programatically (comparing strings is generally not very useful… even when it comes to something as simple as IPv4 or IPv6 address!).
Part of getting here is the SoC project I’m mentoring… which should have an output of some utilities for helping write better tests (rather like we have for NDB… but for SQL instead of NDB API).
3. Sane build system
Something that not just the build team knows how to produce a binary that’s released. The other side of this is a way to build your local working tree (and test it) on BLAH platform, without pushing.
3.5. (yes, i have a 3.5)
Kill HPUX. There’s a reason the name sounds like a disease.
2. Increased liberal use of asserts
This is just a wish from a bug I’ve been tracking down where the code to build an I_S table didn’t check that we opened all the tables successfully before calling handler::info()… which promptly goes fooey because the handler hasn’t opened the table. Luckily here it’s ended in a crash… IMNSHO it’s better to bail out on an assert than possibly return crap to the user…
1. Pluggable data dictionary
There are so many oddities and “bugs” around related to the casually strange mix of data dictionaries around the MySQL Server (and Federated, NDB, InnoDB, Falcon etc) that we could do a lot better if we had a “Virtual Data Dictionary Layer”… where engines who really do have a reason to not be simple (e.g. NDB) could plug in and the MySQL Server could get all the metadata consistently from the cluster (with out own form of sane-ish caching).
This would also solve the online ALTER TABLE frm consistency problem with engines that may roll back the alter table on crash recovery (or not support querying the index until it has finished being built).
Perhaps this is something for either the next engine summit or dev conf…
Hi!
5) hallelujah!
4) Do you know about mysql-test?
3) Improve on the compile script in BUILD/
2) That would be good.
1) Yep.
Cheers,
-Brian
[...] figure Marten, Jay and Stewart can’t be [...]
i was thinking a bit more advanced then mysql-test – things like (in about this much code) be able to write a test case:
begin load X thousand rows in BLAH table
loop update 1 row/txn
loop pkey lookups
loop crash server
end verify contents
end delete all rows
[...] Pipes, Stewart Smith, Marten Mickos, Frank Mash, and Kevin Burton have all gotten into it, and Marten suggested that I [...]
[...] I had five Oracle wishes” post, Jay Pipes outlines his top 5 wishlist for MySQL. Stewart Smith at Ramblings and a number of others follow suit, whereas Antony Curtis of Antony’s MySQL bits says such [...]
[...] Have we done things that I (and others) really wanted done? Back in 2007, I wrote my top 5 wishlist for the MySQL Server. [...]