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…