In the Apache world, you might be familiar with tweaking your config file(s) and then running
$ apachectl configtest
to see if the config parses. We've been discussing this on the drizzle mailing list and talking in general about configuration handling and management. Well, it turns out that you can fake it in MySQL and Drizzle too.
If you have a new configuration in /tmp/new.cnf, try this:
$ mysqld --defaults-file=/tmp/new.cnf --verbose --help
And it'll run mysqld (or drizzled), parse the config, report any problems, print help, and exit without initializing storage engines or trying to grab a port.
Neat trick!
Thanks to Baron Schwartz, Arjen Lentz, and Sheeri Cabral (book) for helping to demonstrate this.
Given the current state of the economy, here's a quick job plug for anyone interested and qualified.
At the Drizzle Developer Day on Friday, I got to meet Adrian Otto from Rackspace. Rackspace has a cloud offering (think Aamazon EC2) that's called Mosso and is willing to employ full time developers who spend all their time working on Drizzle.
Here's what he sent to the mailing list.
I was speaking with Eric Day at the developer conference, and I mentioned that Rackspace is wiling to employ full time developers for the specific purpose of furthering the Drizzle project's mission. He suggested that I email you on this list becuase he expected there would be interest in this offer. If you work on the project now part time, and want to make it a full time job working exclusively on the Drizzle project, let me know. The Rackspcae Cloud believes in open source, and we want to do our part to make Drizzle a wild success.
Talking with him a bit, the rationale is simple: Rackspace wants to offer the best cloud resources they can. Part of that means having infrastructure that their customers need and works well. They're betting the Drizzle is part of their future, and hiring a few people to work on it makes that future a reality sooner than later.
It looks like Mark Callaghan (Google) likes the idea too, as does Don MacAskill (SmugMug).
Anyway, ping me if you're interested and I'll put you in touch.
As I previously mentioned, on Friday I attended the Drizzle Developer Day at Sun in Santa Clara. While there I had the chance to speak to the group while everyone ate their salad, pizza, and cookies.
The talk was titles "What Craigslist wants and needs from Drizzle" and is available as a Google Docs presentation here. I've also embedded a version of the slides below.
I should note here, as I did at the talk, that this presentation is neither comprehensive or completely representative. That is to say that I'm sure there are things I've forgotten. Plus, the fact that I was working with MySQL in other high-volume web shops before coming to Craiglist means that there's definitely some personal bias and pet peeves addressed in there too.
Anyway, that's what I presented.
Thanks to the fine folks at Sun (soon to be Oracle) for hosting and organizing the day. And special thanks to the Drizzle developers for getting together and showing the rest of us how things work and taking time to talk about their plans.