Video of my Percona Live Talk: Why would I run MySQL/MariaDB on POWER anyway?

Good news everyone! There’s video up for the talk I gave at Percona Live in April 2016 up: Why would I run MySQL/MariaDB on POWER anyway?

The talk is a general overview of POWER and why MySQL/MariaDB may be a good fit.

Towards (and beyond) ONE MILLION queries per second

At Percona Live MySQL Conference 2015 next week I’ll be presenting on “Towards One MILLION queries per second” on 14th April at 4:50pm in Ballroom A.

This is the story of work I’ve been doing to get MySQL executing ONE MILLION SQL queries per second. It involves tales of MySQL, tales of the POWER8 Processor and a general amount of fun in extracting huge amounts of performance.

As I speak, I’m working on some even more impressive benchmark results! New hardware, new MySQL versions and really breaking news on MySQL scalability.

How many pages of ToS and Privacy Policies?

So, I started this thought experiment: let’s assume for the moment that government is completely trustworthy, only has your interests at heart and doesn’t secretly sell you out to whoever they feel like. Now, on top of that, what about the agreements you enter into with corporations? How long are they and could you properly understand all the implications to your privacy and give informed consent?

So… I started with when I left home. I got on a Virgin Flight, they have a privacy policy which is eight pages. I then arrived in New Zealand and filled out a customs form. I could not find anything about what the New Zealand customs service could do with that information, but let’s just assume they’re publishing it all on the internet and selling it to the highest bidder. The other alternative is that they follow the New Zealand Privacy act, which is a mere 182 pages.

Once getting through customs I turned on my phone. The basics are probably covered by the New Zealand Telecommunications Privacy Code (35 pages) and since I was on Vodafone NZ, their three page privacy policy likely applies. Of course, I’m roaming, so the Vodafone Australia three page privacy policy also likely applies (of course, under a completely different legal framework). There’s likely things in the other agreements I have with Vodafone, the standard agreement summary is a mere 4 pages and the complete agreement is 84 pages.

I arrived at my hotel and the Langham privacy policy is two pages. I then log into Facebook, 30 pages of important things there, into Twitter, another 11 pages. My phone is all hooked up to Google Play, so that’s another 10 pages. I walk into the conference, the code of conduct is a single page which was a pleasant relief. I then log into work mail, and the GMail terms of service is three pages with a four page privacy policy.

If I was someone who used the iTunes, it would be reasonable that I would watch something in the hotel room – another 24 pages of agreement before then deciding to call home, carefully reading the full 20 pages of Skype terms of service and privacy policy.

In total, that’s 428 pages.

This excludes any license agreements to the operating system you’re using on your laptop, phone and all the application software. It also excludes whatever agreement you enter into about the CCTV footage of you in the taxi to and from the airport.

So, my question to the panel at OSDC was: how on earth is the average consumer meant to be able to make an informed decision and give their informed consent to any of this?

Hong Kong (OpenStack Summit)

I’ll be in Hong Kong for the upcoming OpenStack Summit Nov 5-8. I’d be thrilled to talk database things with others present, especially around Trove DBaaS (DataBase as a Service) and high availability MySQL for OpenStack deployments.

I was last in Hong Kong in 2010 when I worked for Rackspace. The closest office to me was in Hong Kong so that’s where I did my HR onboarding training. I remember telling friends on the Sunday night before leaving for Hong Kong that I may be able to make dinner later in the week purely depending on if somebody got back to me on if I was going to Hong Kong that week. I was, and I went. I took some photos while there.

Walking from the hotel where we were staying to the Rackspace office could be done pretty much entirely through buildings without going outside. There were bits of art around too, which is just kind of awesome – I’m always in favour of random art.
Statues in walkways

The photo below was the view from my hotel room. The OpenStack summit is just by the airport rather than in the middle of town, so the views will be decidedly different to this, but still probably quite spectacular if you’re around the right place (I plan to take camera gear, so shout if you want to journey too)
Hotel Window (Hong Kong)

There are some pretty awesome markets around Hong Kong offering just about everything you’d want, including a lot just out on the street.
Java Road
Hong Kong Street Market

Nightime was pretty awesome, having people from around the world journey out into the night was great.
Rackers walking Hong Kong at Night

I was there during the World Cup, and the streets were wonderfully decorated. I’m particularly proud of this photo as it was handheld, at night, after beer.
Hong Kong streetlife

Speaking at OSDC 2013 in Auckland!

I’ll be speaking at the upcoming OSDC conference in Auckland, New Zealand! It’s on October 21st-23rd and you should go here right now and register. I’m giving two talks at OSDC this year:

  • MySQL in the cloud, As A Service (Monday 21st, 12:00pm)
    There is no one magic solution to having MySQL As A Service work well, it’s a lot of small moving parts and options that need to be set, monitored and configured. We may wish it was different, or look at other database technologies, but there is a lot of legacy code that talks to MySQL, with all it’s idiosyncrasies – and we need to be able to support this code. In this talk, we’ll cover many of the problem areas and what you can do to avoid them.
  • The Agony and Ecstasy of Continuous Integration (Wednesday 23rd, 2:30pm)
    This a tale of the introduction of continuous integration testing into a well established development team. It covers both the highs and lows and discusses strategies to deal with both the positives and negatives and in turn improve your own software engineering practices.

In case you need to quickly justify to your boss why you should go to OSDC, the conference organisers have helpfully provided a page of hints on just that subject.

MySQL Community Portraits needs your $$

There’s an Indiegogo fundraising effort for Julian Cash to come to the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo this year to take your photo! I’ve thrown in a bunch of money to help make this happen. Why? It’s much much much cheaper than getting any professional photo shoot done, and it’s by the awesome Julian, who makes pretty awesome photos.

You’ll get full resolution images too! Basically, this is the cheapest way you’re going to get this quality of photos done of yourself outside of dating a professional portrait photographer. Since I’m not dating a professional portrait photographer, this is an excellent and affordable way to have some truly awesome and up to date photos that I can use.

I went and bought the Gold level sponsorship as I feel that $250 is a small price to pay (especially considering Julian’s previous excellent work). You can support it with more $ or less $ (even $0), I chose $250 as it meant I could claim, at least for a short time, that I’ve over half funded it :)

Those who do not know the future are doomed to repeat it

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the Open Source Developers Conference (OSDC) in Sydney where I gave the dinner keynote. I had previously given the dinner keynote at OSDC 2010 in Melbourne, where I explored a number of interesting topics “that I wasn’t really qualified to talk about.”

In writing the dinner keynote for 2010, I took the idea that people come to conferences to hear from experts in the field and decided that I should instead do the opposite of that. Talk about all the things that I think are interesting but I’m not an expert in. So in 2010 I covered: Drizzle database server (the only thing I was actually qualified to talk about), developing your own film, how much effort it takes to write a book, brewing your own beer, Bluehackers (and mental health in general), Security (it was the time of Stuxnet, oppressive border security), censorship (and how government claims that the internet is both different to and just like publishing a book at the same time), Wikileaks, how perhaps we should go after child pornographers rather than waste money on totalitarian filters, feminism, code of conducts at conferences, homophobia, a history of marriage and the notion of ‘traditional marriage’, the concept of freedom itself and a few pictures of vegetables made to look like faces. In the words of some attendees, “there was something to make everyone at least slightly uncomfortable at some point”.

My 2010 talk went really well, there was much applause and it inspired at least one person to go and brew their own beer (in itself a victory). Many thanks to Donna for spending a non-trivial amount of time helping me polish the final talk and help ensure some of my most important points were communicated properly.

So for 2012, I felt I had some big shoes to fill. Picking a topic (and writing the talk itself) for a dinner keynote is tricky. You have a captive audience with a wide variety of interests (and likely a few partners of attendees who aren’t at all technically minded). I wanted a topic that could have a good amount of humour (after all, we’re at dinner, relaxing and chatting) as well as a serious message that would speak to all the developers in the room (after all, this was the Open Source Developers Conference). Needing a title for the talk much in advance of when I would start writing the talk, I started thinking along the lines of “Those who do not know UNIX are doomed to re-implement it – poorly” and “Those who do not know the past are doomed to repeat it” – thinking that there must be some good lessons that I’ve learned over the past years that could be turned into a dinner talk. I ended up settling on “Those who do not know the future are doomed to repeat it”.

I, of course, left most of the specifics to be determined much closer to the conference itself as procrastination seems to be an integral part of writing a talk. Fast forward a while and if you were nearby you would have heard me exclaim “Who had this dumb-ass idea for a talk?” and “well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”  Setting yourself constraints is good, and at least narrowed the search space for constructing something that’d go down well. Next came “How on earth do I construct a cohesive narrative around that?” as a whole bunch of fun anecdotes about what people in the past considered the future is great, but how do you weave a story around it? In thinking about what used to be the future (and indeed, researching it), I had the realisation that this in itself is a really good story and vehicle to talk about how to produce better software.

And so, I solidified a set of laws, and for mostly humorous purposes, I’ve called these “Stewarts Laws”. So, we started with:

Those who do not know the future are doomed to repeat it.

Stewarts 0th Law

Because in computing, we start counting from zero.

I then went on a grand tour of how we got to have the PC. Early personal computers being iterative improvements on technology that came before, and how packaging technology as an appealing product helps adoption and that no matter how good something is, if it’s too expensive, it’s never going to be mainstream. This last point was a homage to the great Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was successful over the great Encyclopaedia Galactica for two reasons, one of which was “it was slightly cheaper”.

The platform which is more open will eventually succeed over ones that are more closed. (This really should have been a law… but I missed the opportunity). One example was Mozilla. The initial source release was way back in 1998 and this “quirky open source project” took a very long time to deliver a useful web browser (excluding all the internal Netscape development on this complete rewrite of the browser).

All complete rewrites of any sufficiently complex software takes at least 5 years to be remotely usable.

Stewarts 1st Law

With the insight that the more free platforms (the PC, Windows, the web, Mozilla) eventually win out and being a talk about the future, I could not possibly not cover “The Year of the Linux Desktop”. This was useful to cover the install and user experience of Debian 2.2 (potato). This was Linux in the year 2000 (with IPv6 support, and with World IPv6 day only six months ago, this is certainly the future). It was not friendly.

But there was KNOPPIX that built on what came before and this showed the way so that other distributions could end up creating a situation where there are now many distributions of Linux that make running a free desktop something that is no longer masochistic, it’s something that can be decidedly pleasant.

I (of course) had to cover the freedom in your pants. The cell phone. Specifically, how there is more free software running on a computer that fits in our pants pockets than there was storage in the computers we grew up with. It doesn’t matter if Android is better than an iPhone or not, the more open, free and cheaper platforms always win. But really, it’s just iterative improvement on what came before.

All innovation is really just iterative improvement.

Stewarts 2nd Law

Very rarely (if ever) is there a “eureka” moment that doesn’t build upon the work of others. Find your giant to stand upon so that you can see further.

We can, of course, get it wrong. I used the example of New Coke and wondered if Unity or GNOME3 are our “New Coke” or if Windows 8 is the new Vista. But really, it’s not making a mistake that is bad, it’s not realising it and correcting. What we need is CI. Not Continuous Integration (although that is part of it), I’m talking about Continuous Improvement.

Anybody who took a “Software Engineering” course at university will have read about, studied, and parroted things about “the waterfall model” and “software prototyping” and “incremental build model” and “spiral model” and maybe even “SCRUM” or XP (which seems to be jumping off cliffs and yelling at fish). You probably had to do an assignment where you wrote “We’re going to do X model” and then had to stick to it, quickly finding that it just didn’t quite work that way.

This is because all this static model of software development methodology is a bunch of dairy production byproduct – otherwise known as BOOLSHIT. There is no static way written in stone and there certainly isn’t “one true way.”

The best battle plans don’t survive first contact with the compiler

Stewarts 3rd Law

This law is obviously stolen, which leads me to:

Stealing good ideas is itself a good idea, that you should steal.

Stewarts 4th Law

Software development is evolution by natural selection. Mutations in software battle it out and the fittest survive. This is even more true in free software development, as anyone is free to fork the product, mutate it and compete. In this way, free software accelerates the free market – it forces companies to continually add value rather than vendor lock in.

Our development processes also evolve. We try new things and keep what works. There may be a “state of the art” that we think exists, but really what matters is continuing to improve your development process. You don’t have to suddenly catch up, just improve.

  • Revision Control
    We’ve had RCS, CVS, Subversion. We’ve had bzr, hg and git. Distributed is obviously the current state of the art.
  • Code review
    and improving how we do code review. Could you review code better? Could we have automated code review?
  • assert(), make the compiler do the work, defensive coding
    Write code to do some of your code review for you.
  • Explode at compile time rather than runtime (i.e. not user visible)
    Detecting problems earlier is better.
  • Extensive Unit testing
    Test each component, have components be components, not spaghetti.
  • Extensive testing
    Test the system as a whole
  • Running the test suite
    Actually run the test suite
  • Reliable test suite
    Have the test suite be reliable so that a failure really is a failure and not a false negative.
  • Continuous Integration
    Always test how things go together
  • Test before integration
    Test before pushing to trunk, ensuring even further that trunk is always releasable.
  • Merge captain
    Takes approved code, merges it. This is variants on the Linus model.
  • Automated merges
    Take the manual steps out, we can automate them (who needs to type 10 version control commands in when one will do)
  • Always releasable trunk
    “Release early, release often” refined to “release something that isn’t crap”
  • Release checklists
    There are probably different things you want to do upon release, check that you do them. For adding awesome new features, you want your marketing department to know about it. For awesome bug fixes, you want your support staff to know about it.
  • Continuous Deployment
    There is no environment like production environment.

This led me to two more laws:

Any system of sufficient size will have several versions of each component deployed simultaneously.

Stewarts 5th Law

Constructing software is itself a system of sufficient size.

Stewarts 5th Law, part B

This applies to software you both deploy yourself and release as a tarball (or however you do it). Even if we don’t like to think about it, when we release a software package we are slightly involved in deploying it. We can certainly make it easier or harder to deploy. There are always OS and library updates that will be out there, so there will always be your software running in different environments.

Not only will people using your software use it in different environments, the people developing your software will be too. No two developers have the same development environment setup. One will use a different editor, different shell, slightly different version of the compiler (maybe they haven’t applied an update yet) etc etc. We can’t program to the “one true environment” because no such thing exists.

So, What’s next?

Some of our older problems have good solutions, but many of the newer ones do not. How do we get the state of the art in software development to more people? What’s the next step to explore?

I encourage you to constantly think about your development process and what the future holds for it. After all, it is adapt or perish – the past is littered with the technological corpses of things that were “the future” but failed to innovate any further.

Sessions at the Percona Live MySQL Conference that interest me

For the past many years, there’s been a conference in April, at the Santa Clara Convention Centre where the topic has been MySQL and the surrounding ecosystem. The first year I went, I gave a talk on the new features in MySQL Cluster 5.1 to a overflowing room of attendees. For me, it’s an event that’s mixed with speaking about something I’ve been working on and talking to other attendees about everything from how a particular part of the server works to where we can escape to for nearby good vegan food.

So, I thought I’d share some of the sessions that I’m really looking forward to. My selection is probably atypical, but may be interesting to others. I’m not going to list the keynotes, although they are often of a lot of value. I’m also going to attempt to avoid listing a few really awesome well known speakers simply because there are other really interesting sessions that also need exposure!

  • Starring Sakila: Building Data Warehouses and BI solutions using MySQL and Pentaho
    I need to base decisions off data, not simply a gut feeling (I’m not Stephen Colbert after all). I ran into a bunch of stumbling blocks when trying to work with Pentaho a couple of weeks ago, and I’m really hoping that this session shines some light on how to use it to better and more easily make arguments based on evidence to others in the company.
  • Testing MySQL Databases: The State Of The Art
    I’ve worked with Patrick for several years now, and he’s currently a valuable member of my team at Percona. For those who are interested in the state of the art of open source database testing, this is the session to be in.
  • Getting InnoDB Compression Ready for Facebook Scale
    This session is on at the same time as I’m speaking, so I probably won’t be able to attend (people keep coming to my sessions so I usually can’t sneak out). I’m really interested in how they’ve modified the compression code to help with their (large) workload.
  • Backing Up Facebook
    I hear that Facebook has a couple of database servers, a few dozen users and a few floppy disks full of data. This should be a fun story :)
  • Introducing XtraBackup Manager
    Being responsible for XtraBackup development at Percona, the XtraBackup topics really interest me. Lachlan has been working on a simple backup manager for XtraBackup to help create something that is a more complete backup solution than a tool which simply creates a backup.
  • Extending Xtrabackup – A Point-In-Time System
    Another good case of using XtraBackup as part of a comprehensive backup strategy. I have to be honest, I’m looking for ways in which we can improve XtraBackup to better fit the needs of people. It may be that there are a few small things we can do to make it easier for people do deploy and use.
  • Getting Started with Drizzle 7.1
    We’re about to do the 7.1 release of Drizzle! If you’re interested in having a SQL database that is designed to be used in large scale web applications and cloud environments, come along to this talk.
  • MySQL Idiosyncrasies That Bite
    I have to admit, I’m interested in Ronalds talk here to basically ensure we didn’t miss fixing anything in Drizzle. I do promise not to at any point yell out “Fixed in Drizzle” though.

Go here to register: http://www.percona.com/live/mysql-conference-2012/ (early bird pricing and discounted hotel rooms end March 12th, so you want to register sooner rather than later).

HailDB: A NoSQl API Direct to InnoDB

At the MySQL Conference and Expo last week I gave a session on HailDB. I’ve got the slides up on slideshare so you can either view through them or download them. I think the session went well, and there certainly is some interest in HailDB out there (which is great!).

Fixed in Drizzle: No more “GOTCHA’s”

 

O'Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2011

At the upcoming MySQL Conference and Expo, I’m going to give a Thursday afternoon (2pm) session entitled Fixed in Drizzle: No more “GOTCHA’s”. I plan to have a lot of fun with this session..

If you go back to the very start of when I started submitting code to Drizzle (June 2008) – I was going and fixing some of my favourite “gotcha’s” inside the code: BUILD/ scripts that didn’t build the way releases would, wrappers on POSIX functions with different (and inconsistent) semantics, NETWARE support, a non thread safe client lib, my_errno (different to errno) etc. I won’t really be talking about internals like this – it may give me a happy but really isn’t the latest awesome in databases.

I’ll instead be going over the way more awesome user and DBA visible things we’ve fixed/added/removed from Drizzle that make it a database with as few GOTCHA’s as possible.

Authentication (pluggable, LDAP), Logging (to syslog, gearman), DATA_DICTIONARY, INFORMATION_SCHEMA, engines owning their own metadata, STRICT mode by default, removing global mutexes, improving the Storage Engine API, improving the replication log, including code such as PBXT and PBMS Blob Streaming, filesystem engine (read files from disk like a table), pluggable protocol, UTF8 by default, ENUM data type, auto_increment behaviour.

All this and more is “Fixed in Drizzle”.

(oh, and there’s no 24bit integer or a BLOB that can only be 255 bytes)

LCA Miniconf Call for Papers: Data Storage: Databases, Filesystems, Cloud Storage, SQL and NoSQL

This miniconf aims to cover many of the current methods of data storage and retrieval and attempt to bring order to the universe. We’re aiming to cover what various systems do, what the latest developments are and what you should use for various applications.

We aim for talks from developers of and developers using the software in question.

Aiming for some combination of: PostgreSQL, Drizzle, MySQL, XFS, ext[34], Swift (open source cloud storage, part of OpenStack), memcached, TokyoCabinet, TDB/CTDB, CouchDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, HBase….. and more!

Call for Papers open NOW (Until 22nd October).

Kodak Portra

I started to realise that I was liking the look of photos shot on Kodak Portra. I wanted to shoot some of it to see what I thought. I bought a pack of 5 rolls of 160VC from Glazer’s just before heading to OSCON.

Here are some of the shots I got:
Selena

Dustin

Mark

Helen


(granted I didn’t press the shutter release, but I like it)

HiPurr Camp!
Is the one that sealed it for me. This was the “ahh… I can use this for all sorts” shot.

All of these were developed and scanned at the Walgreens down the street. I could probably do better scans of some… but this was awfully less work for me.

I am really liking the skin tones from it. The vividness of colours also comes through while retaining excellent skin tones (certainly not always the case). I may even end up shooting some at Burning Man (did buy more rolls yesterday!)

There is (of course) more being added to my Kodak Portra 160VC set on flickr.

Drizzle @ Velocity (seemed to go well)

Monty’s talk at Velocity 2010 seemed to go down really well (at least from reading the agile admin entry on Drizzle). There are a few great bits from this article that just made me laugh:

Oracle’s “run Java within the database” is an example of totally retarded functionality whose main job is to ruin your life”

Love it that we’re managing to get the message out.

Interesting Videos from the MySQL Conference and Expo

There’s a good number of videos appearing online from the MySQL Conference and Expo that was on last week.

Here’s a short list of interesting things to look at if you weren’t able to make the sessions. Obviously, this is from my view as a Drizzle developer. There were other interesting things, but this list is more focused towards where my Drizzle brain is stimulated.

on presenting

Dilbert.com

This is totally not confined to at-work presentations.

The number of sessions I have sat through that could have taken 5 minutes instead of 20,30,40 or even 60 is amazing. Remember: I have not flown half way around the globe to see you read. I have come to hear a story, to see how conclusions were formed and interact.

Often, the tools are deficient. Powerpoint encourages bad habits (you can use PowerPoint for excellent slide decks too, but ignore the temptations of boring templates, bad effects and dot lists). The dot point list is more often than not your enemy. I (and anybody else in the audience who has learnt to read) can read your dot points faster than you can. While I’m reading, I’m not listening to you. If you spoke a cure for all forms of cancer just after having put a slide up filled with dot points… 90% of people will miss it.

Now, dot points are an excellent way to remind you what the heck you’re meant to be talking about (and in what order). Use presenter notes! They are really useful.

If your laptop/presentation software doesn’t support a “presenter” mode that lets you view presenter notes but not the whole room, simply write them down, print them out, or anything like that. One simple practice run through will make you be able to do this seamlessly.

The last couple of presentations I did were completely assembled using 280slides.com. An excellent web app for doing presentations. It will import and export ODF (and other formats) so you’re not tied to a (unfortunately) non open source web app. That being said, it ran fine in my browser and unlike OpenOffice.org, did not make me want to stab people repeatedly every time I used it.

So, Stewart’s quick tips:

  • Tell a story. How did you get to your conclusions?
  • Don’t just read. Use visuals to accompany the talk. Visuals aren’t the talk.
  • Practice. Just once or twice through will make things a lot smoother.

Equipment:

  • Make sure your equipment works beforehand. Nobody wants to see you fiddle around with your Windows/OSX laptop only to find out you didn’t bring the dongle or can’t operate the Displays control panel. (Interestingly enough, I see Linux “just work” more than Windows or OSX these days).
  • If there is a microphone, use it. I don’t want to struggle to hear you.
  • If you are constantly using a laser pointer you either have too much on your slides or the slide does not highlight the important information. (laser pointers are useful when people ask questions though)

One blog I love on the subject is Presentation Zen. I’ll also recommend the book, but you can get so much just from the web site.

Some excellent recent presentations:

  • Simplicity Through OptimizationPaul McKenney
    Paul is able to explain RCU clearly and concisely through visuals. You are left with no doubt that this does really work. The visuals are not everything, they assist in the telling of the RCU story
  • Teach every child about foodJamie Oliver
    I watched this online. Note how not everything was smooth the whole way. Also note how this was still effective. Passion is an awesome tool. Check out the simple graph showing lead causes of death: simple and effective.
  • Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to Zero!
    Historically, Bill Gates has not been the most engaging speaker. We can all forget the horrible PowerPoint slides with four hundred dot points about some release of something that nobody cared about. This is different. Clear, concise, engaging and simple visuals to make the point.

Drizzle low-hanging-fruit

We have an ongoing Drizzle milestone called low-hanging-fruit. The idea is that when there’s something that  could be done, but we don’t quite have the time to do it immediately, we’ll add a low-hanging-fruit blueprint so that people looking to get a start on the codebase and contributing code to Drizzle have a place to go to find things to do.

Some of my personal favourites are:

Also relatively low hanging fruit can be writing some plugins. Some simple plugin types include:

  • Authentication
    Got somewhere that you could authenticate against for connecting to a DB? Write a plugin for it! Current auth plugins are auth_http and auth_pam.

    • Perhaps you want to authenticate against a central DB? checking in memcached first?
    • Perhaps a htaccess style method
  • Functions
    Apply some function to a column. These are pretty simple to write (see md5, compress examples). Perhaps interfaces to encryption/decryption? a hashing function?

    • ROT13
    • 3DES
    • AES
      Bonus points if you get any of these to use the T2000 crypto accellerator stuff
    • ID3 tag decoding
    • file type detection (well.. BLOB)

So there’s a fair bit you can do to get started. Best of all, you can chat with the Drizzle developers next week at the MySQL Conference and Expo and Drizzle Developer Day.

Drizzle Developer Day reminder

We’re having a Drizzle Developer Day just after the MySQL Conference and Expo next week. You don’t have to be attending the conference to come to the Drizzle Developer Day. Just bring your enthusiasm for free databases, Drizzle and good software. Spaces are limited, so head on over to the signup page and fill in your name if you haven’t already

If coming from the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara (where the MySQL Conference and Expo is), at least I will be driving from there, so let me know if you want a lift.