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PBMS in Drizzle | Ramblings.

For those not familiar with PBMS it does two things: provide a place (not in the table) for BLOBs to be stored (locally on disk or even out to S3) and provide a HTTP interface to get and store BLOBs.

This means you can do really neat things such as have your BLOBs replicated, consistent and all those nice databasey things as well as easily access them in a scalable way (everybody knows how to cache HTTP).

This is awesome. How many times have you added a URL to your database table and then had to write API’s of some sort to go fetch that URL at read time, and write that URL somewhat atomically at write time?

Drizzle isn’t even “done” yet, and already the plugins are flying out of the community. The fact that this is a plugin, and won’t affect *anybody* who doesn’t want it, is why I’m confident Drizzle is moving in the right directly. I’m not sure why it has taken so long, but this feels like its doing for the RDBMS what apache has done for HTTP serving… make it flexible and extensible, and folks will find interesting ways to use it.

This past April I was riding in a late model, 2 door rental car with an interesting trio for sure. On my right sat Patrick Galbraith, maintainer of DBD::mysql and author of the Federated storage engine. Directly in front of me manning the steering wheel (for those of you keen on spatial description, you may have noted at this point that its most likely I was seated in the back, left seat of a car which is designed to be driven on the right side of the road. EOUF [end of useless fact]), David Axmark, co-founder of MySQL. Immediately to his right sat Brian Aker, of (most recently) Drizzle fame.
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Its always been a dream of mine. I’ve posted about parallel replication on Drizzle’s mailing list before. I think when faced with the problem of a big, highly concurrent master, and scaling out reads simply with lower cost slaves, this is going to be the only way to go.

So today I was really glad to see that somebody is trying out the idea. Seppo Jaakola from “Codership”, who I’ve never heard of before today, posted a link to an article on his blog about his experimentation with parallel replication slaves. The findings are pretty interesting.
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