Hot on the heels of this week's Drizzle 2012.01.30 source release, we are now also releasing beta quality binary RPMs for your downloading and testing pleasure! While we are revitalizing the Drizzle yum repository, you can download the rpm-bundle from our Launchpad project page: https://launchpad.net/pkg-drizzle/+download

As the Fremont development cycle is ending it's beta cycle and heading for release candidates, we are starting to publish also binary packages for downloads. Today we are releasing RPM packages for RHEL/CentOS 6.0. Fedora 16 packaging has unfortunately been postponed. We will eventually support also Fedora 16 RPMs, but in the mean time you can possibly spot some Drizzle developers on twitter or irc making snarky comments about systemd ...

In the following week(s) we will also publish Debian and Ubuntu packages.

Note that these packages are a first release of their kind and still a bit experimental. What this means is that the underlying Drizzle release itself is stabilizing quite nicely, but the packaging process is currently not completely integrated nor automated.

Please report errors at the main Drizzle bug tracker, and direct your general feedback to the drizzle-discuss mailing list.

Details:

• These packages were built from the Drizzle bzr trunk at tag 2012.01.30.
• In addition a branch that supports "make rpm" was merged from lp:~hingo/drizzle/drizzle-integrate-packaging-rpm. This is based on the same RPM spec as was used for Drizzle 7, but the intent is to integrate it with the main Drizzle source code and then Jenkins builds. The current release was however still a manual process.
• When building this way, an additional bzr tag --force 2012.01.30 was needed to maintain the same version number.
• Along the RPMs we have uploaded a source tar file fake-drizzle7-2012.01.30.tar.gz. This corresponds to the real Drizzle 2012.01.30 release, plus the above changes.
• The RPM files are made available as a tar bundle. The process to publish into the Drizzle yum repository is currently broken but will resume in the near future.
• A related issue is that the packages are not signed.
• Known issue: If you install the plugin rpms, they will be automatically loaded at startup. However, some of them (in particular, many auth plugins, the policy plugins and possibly the slave plugin) don't actually work without further configuration and will thus prevent the server from starting. If you encounter this plugin, you should either complete the configuration (in /etc/drizzle/conf.d/[plugin].conf) or, if you don't want to use it, uninstall the plugin.

In this release:
* continuing refactoring, restructuring, and code quality improvements
* many more documentation improvements
* additional bugs fixed
* improvements in test suite

The Drizzle download file can be found here.

In this release:
* continuing refactoring, restructuring, and code quality improvements
* many more documentation improvements
* documentation available at http://docs.drizzle.org
* fixes to libdrizzle .pc support
* fixes to build scripts
* additional bugs fixed

The Drizzle download file can be found here

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.

The Fremont beta is out and ready to be tested.

In this release:

• Multi-master replication (no conflict resolution)
• UUID's for replication (thanks to Joe Daly)
• 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
• Work on stored procedure interface
• Removal of drizzleadmin utility
• Removal of HailDB engine
• Improvements to Drizzle documentation (thanks to Daniel Nichter, Henrik Ingo, and Vijay Samuel for their efforts)
• Revamped testing system with suites of randgen, sysbench, sql-bench, and crashme tests
• Continued code refactoring

The Drizzle download file can be found here

In this release:

• Continued code refactoring
• Cleanup of test system
• Document cleanup

The Drizzle download file can be found here

Since it's inception in 2008 Drizzle has taken the approach of an open source community project. It's been run as a meritocracy by its developer community, with developers from various companies and just individuals. Even though at first Sun and then Rackspace did sponsor a core team to work full time on the project, the project is not owned by any particular company, but Drizzle is developed by a vibrant and diverse community. We've been proud to have between 20-40 active contributors each month.

With the first stable release in March 2011, interest in the project grew. At this point we also decided it was time to solidify and clarify the status of the project as a non-profit community project. Out of a couple options available, we chose to become an Associated Project at the Software in the Public Interest. The SPI is a charitable US non-profit corporations that acts as an umbrella organization to many open source projects, including some well known ones like Debian and PostgreSQL. Drizzle was accepted as an SPI Associated Project by the Board on August 10th.

At this point, we would like to extend our gratitude to Josh Berkus (a PostgreSQL lead developer) who guided and sponsored Drizzle through the application process! We appreciate not just your experience and expertise with the SPI, but also the gesture of friendly help between two open source database projects.

Having a legal entity behind Drizzle has a number of useful benefits and any open source project that is bigger than just one or two guys should seriously consider using one of these umbrella organizations.

One benefit that is available to us starting this week is that you can now donate money to Drizzle via the SPI. The easiest way to donate is using a credit card at Click & Pledge. The SPI website lists some alternative methods such as using a cheque. For US tax payers donations are tax-deductible and if you are a business you can of course write the donation off as an expense.

Donations made via the SPI bank account will be properly accounted for by the SPI treasurer. Please read above links on how to "earmark" your donation for Drizzle. Available funds will be used by the Drizzle
project primary for expenses such as legal or IT infrastructure and secondary for arranging developer meetings and if possible sponsoring attendance at conferences. Note that if you want to sponsor development of Drizzle, such as a particular feature, and you have a large enough budget to be usable for that purpose, we recommend you rather contract such development directly via one of the commercial service providers that employ Drizzle developers.

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:

• Documentation updates. Thanks to everyone who has contributed edits / new documentation
• IPV6 bug fixes - continued polish of this new feature
• Query log improvements - thanks to Daniel Nichter (and also for his docs work!)

The Drizzle download file can be found here.