Lenz Grimmer's blog

Some time ago I posted a compilation of applications and programming languages that provide an API to connect to the MySQL Server. As it turned out, I forgot a few that I would like to mention here:

• Apache DBD API: a MySQL driver for mod_apr_dbd is not included in the official distribution, but can be obtained seperately from here. Some distributions (e.g. openSUSE) actually provide installable packages of this driver module.
• GRASS MySQL driver: The MySQL database driver in GRASS enables GRASS applications to store vector attributes in a MySQL server. Alternatively, data can be stored in an embedded version of the MySQL Server.
• HDBC: HDBC provides an abstraction layer between Haskell programs and SQL relational databases. This lets you write database code once, in Haskell, and have it work with any number of backend SQL databases.
• libdrizzle: This is the client and protocol library for Drizzle and MySQL that provides both client and server interfaces. A number of APIs (e.g. Java, Lua, Perl and Ruby as well as Python) have been built on top of it, but I'm not quite sure if they all support the MySQL client/server protocol as well.
• MySQL Connector/Python: MySQL Connector/Python is implementing the MySQL Client/Server protocol completely in Python. This means you don't have to compile anything - the MySQL client library doesn't even have to be installed on your system.

Do you know of any other MySQL Connectors/APIs? Let me know!

I just realized that I haven't blogged for more than a month! Shame on me. But I will blame it on being away on conferences and vacation for quite some time And if you are following me on twitter, you may have noticed what I was going on in my life and that I did't get hit by a bus...

So what was going on since I returned back home from the MySQL Conference? First off, I uploaded und sorted my pictures from the conference and the Drizzle developer day on Flickr. I also uploaded the slides (PDF) from Colin and myself speaking about "MySQL Server Backup, Restoration, and Disaster Recovery Planning" to the MySQL Conference site and they are now available for download from the session page.

On May 4th and 5th I attended the amoocon in Rostock, Germany - a conference primarily about Open Source Telephony and VoIP, where I gave two talks (in German) about MySQL HA Solutions and MySQL Backup and Security Best Practices. There were several other MySQL-related sessions at this conference (e.g. Geert speaking about MySQL Cluster) and I was quite impressed to learn about how widely used it is in the VoIP/Telephony sector. The PDFs of my slides for both talks are available from the conference web site as well as on my slidespace on SlideShare (a very convenient service that I recently started using). There even is an MP3 and video recording of the HA talk, which is also linked from the session page mentioned above.

Right after the amoocon, I attended the next09 conference, which took place in Hamburg, Germany. On the first day I helped manning the Sun booth for some time (Sun Startup Essentials Germany was a sponsor of the event) and listened to some talks, on Wednesday I gave a presentation about "Working for a Virtual Company: How do we do it at MySQL?". A video recording of my talk is available from sevenload. Last time I checked the video was truncated, but I hope they will publish a complete version of it soon. Unfortunately I had a very bad speaking slot - the very first one in the morning (9:00am), after there was a party/social event going on the night before... But luckily there still were ~20-30 people in the audience. This was the first time that I gave this presentation and talked about something less technical, which was actually quite fun! As for the other recent talks, the slides are on SlideShare.

From May 14th to the 16th I was in Verona, Italy to speak about MySQL Backup and Security and bzr - The Bazaar source revision control system at the Italian phpDay. This was quite a nice event with ~150 attendees and Rasmus Lerdorf giving two talks as well. However, many of the sessions were in Italian, so I decided to spend some time walking around the city and taking lots of pictures. I also took a number pictures from the conference, but the light was pretty dim in the room and many shots turned out to be too blurry. Next year they plan to have the phpDay in Rimini - I definitely plan to be there!

Today I attended the Drizzle Developer Day which took place in the auditorium of the Sun Campus in Santa Clara.

Many of the the Drizzle core hackers as well as several other people interested in the development attended this event, hacking away and discussing various issues. Jeremy Zawodny gave a presentation about Craigslist's needs for Drizzle, Jay Pipes gave an overview over Google's protocol buffers library. I took a number of pictures, which you can find in my Flickr photo set.

I joined a group of people that haven't built Drizzle from source by themselves so far, helping them with installing Bazaar and the required libraries. As Drizzle requires several third-party libraries that sometimes are not included in the common linux distributions (or only in outdated versions), we spent some time in getting these build requirements fulfilled.

One of the requirements for building Drizzle is libdrizzle - the client & protocol library. So one first has to download and compile this one, before the actual build of the server can proceed. I noticed that the libdrizzle source distribution contained an RPM spec file already, so I've been working on adding libdrizzle to the openSUSE build service today. The packages for various distributions (Fedora, openSUSE, RHEL, Mandriva) will be available for download shortly. Along the way I also fixed several small issues in the spec file and created a libdrizzle-devel subpackage. The patches are now proposed for merging on Launchpad, I hope Eric will take a look at these shortly.