Changes in Drizzle 7.1 series since Drizzle 7 include:

- Multi-master replication
- Servers are identified with UUID in replication
- HTTP JSON interface available (experimental)
- Percona Innodb patches merged
- Xtrabackup in-tree
- IPV6 data type available
- Query log plugin
- Log output to syslog is enabled by default
- Ability to publish transactions to zeromq and rabbitmq
- Improvements to logging stats plugin
- Native multi-tenancy (database virtualization) support (catalogs)
- Removal of drizzleadmin utility (you can now do all administration from drizzle client itself)
- Removal of HailDB engine
- Revamped testing system Kewpie all-inclusive with suites of randgen, sysbench, sql-bench, and crashme tests
- Continued code refactoring & various bug fixes

Installing Drizzle 7.1.32-rc

The source tar package is available from our Launchpad download area. Please see the manual on how to install Drizzle 7.1.32-rc from source tar package.

The Ubuntu packages are available from the Drizzle PPA. Instructions on how to install from the PPA are in the Drizzle manual.

CentOS 6 packages are available from download.drizzle.org. Instructions on how to install them with yum are in the Drizzle manual.

Note: For Drizzle 7.1.32-rc, only 64-bit packages were built for RedHat/Centos. Please let us know if there is demand for 32-bit packages (such as by commenting to this blog post.)

Known issues

All of the optional plugins are packaged in their own package. These are named drizzle-plugin-*. If a plugin is installed, it is also configured to load by default. (see /etc/drizzle/conf.d/pluginname.cnf) However, not all plugins actually work without further configuration. These plugins will cause the server startup to fail. The workaround is to either configure the plugin to work, or uninstall it if you don't want to use it. (Related blueprint) In short, you should only install the plugins you want to use. Don't install all available plugins.

Please post bugs on the Drizzle bug tracker and questions and general feedback to drizzle-discuss mailing list.

This white paper will explain how Drizzle supports IPv6. The support for IPv6 networking was added to Drizzle early on and is available already in the first Drizzle 7 release. The Drizzle 7.1 release also adds the support for an IPV6 Data Type, to provide a way of storing IPv6 addresses in the database that is both user friendly and efficient. As an introduction we will also cover the differences between IPv4 and IPv6 network addresses and the reasons for transitioning from IPv4 to IPv6 addresses.

With this white paper we wish to thank the Google Summer of Code program for supporting Drizzle. The IPV6 data type was developed as a GSOC 2011 project by Muhammad Umair, with Mark Atwood mentoring. The IPv6 networking support was developed by Brian Aker and Eric Day, at the time employed by Sun Microsystems.

This is the first Release candidate for Drizzle 7.1
Changes since previous release (2012.01.30) include:

* Various bug fixes from Stewart Smith
* New versioning system from Henrik Hingo
* Updated docs

Changes since Drizzle 7 include:

- Multi-master replication
- UUID's for replication
- JSON interface available
- Percona Innodb patches merged
- Xtrabackup in-tree
- IPV6 data type available
- query login plugin (syslog) is enabled / on by default
- Ability to publish transactions to zeromq
- Improvements to logging stats plugin
- Support for catalogs
- Removal of drizzleadmin utility
- Removal of HailDB engine
- Revamped testing system with suites of randgen, sysbench, sql-bench, and crashme tests
- Continued code refactoring
- Various bug fixes

Admission to Drizzle Day is free, however we recommend that you consider making a voluntary donation between 50 - 150 USD to our SPI account to cover for the costs of this conference: click here to donate. Note that if you are expensing your travel and Percona Live attendance with your employer anyway, you can also expense this payment as a conference fee.

Reflecting the fact that Drizzle 7 has now been out for a year, and Drizzle 7.1 will be released before the conference, the content for this Drizzle Day is geared more towards end users than before. You can learn about unique Drizzle features like true multi-tenancy support, the HTTP JSON interface, and more! Toward the end of the day we also have content that might interest potential contributors and you can end the day by talking to Drizzle developers who are happy to guide you in both using Drizzle as well as becoming an active community member.

Click here for schedule and registration information!

The Drizzle Day follows right after the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo where you will also find Drizzle talks, BoFs and a booth in the Exhibition hall dot-org-pavilion. We would like to thank Percona for sponsoring the Drizzle Day by covering a large part of the costs as well as marketing the event as an official side-conference to PLMCE.

The DNS outage was related to our transferring of the drizzle.org domain from an individual Drizzle developer to Software in the Public Interest, Inc, our umbrella non-profit corporation. We don't know exactly why, but something went wrong between the registrars, so that the Whois record listed Tucows, the sponsoring registrar used by SPI, as the new registrar, but all other information was still pointing to the old registrar, including some Godaddy nameservers. As Godaddy eventually stopped answering DNS queries for drizzle.org - as they should - the drizzle.org domain became unavailable. 10 hours later the issue was fixed, and the correct SPI nameservers started to propagate through the DNS system. At the time of this writing, everything should have been working normally for some hours already.

And yes, in related news, drizzle.org is now transfered to the ownership of Software in the Public Interest. This is yet another step in our process of becoming a solid non-profit community project, with fiscal services provided by the SPI. So far the experience has been enjoyable and we've really felt a warm welcome into the family of SPI hosted free and open source software projects.

On that note I'd like to thank Ganneff, Solver, Hydroxide and weasel from the #spi  channel for actively helping in troubleshooting and fixing the problem today.

Community members Henrik Ingo and Stewart Smith will be there and both will be presenting on Drizzle.  Hope to see you there!

In this release:

• multi-master replication available via slave plugin. Single master replication works as it has previously (some changes to config file required)
• split libdrizzle v 1.0 and 2.0
• Code refactoring (Thanks to Olaf van der Spek for his efforts here!)
• Code cleanup (mysys, etc)
• Various bug fixes

Look for xtrabackup soon!

The Drizzle download file can be found here.

If someone in the community wants to take over maintenance of Drizzle on FreeBSD, we would be delighted! It is simply a matter of it taking too much of our limited time to keep things running on this system.

UPDATE:  As you can see below, we've had the FreeBSD port maintainer offer to help us keep things going.  Go open source! : )

The response has been tremendous...it is all kinds of rewarding to see new faces in IRC and to have feedback from new users.  We've seen lots of new visitors to the blog and our download numbers have been most satisfying.  Thank you for giving Drizzle a spin.

Here are some quick bits of news that you may have missed:

• LinuxJedi's Last Week In Drizzle - the GA version - Andrew covers most of the interesting news from last week.
• Patrick Galbraith of Blue Gecko (and DBD::Drizzle fame) has provided some Drizzle AMI's for everyone to try out their new favorite DBMS ; )
• Drizzle has once again been accepted for Google's Summer of Code

We have some very, very interesting things cooking up for the 2011 MySQL User's Conference and we hope to see you there.  Please remember to sign up for Drizzle Developer Day or Google Summer of Code if you are interested...time is running out.

We'd also really love to have more feedback on the software.  Any thoughts from anyone deploying Drizzle?  Any questions / issues from trying it out?  Anything else?  If so, IRC, emails and launchpad will help put us in touch : )