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)