Python does not have a built in package to connect to MySQL as for example PHP does and therefore PyDumpy relies on MySQL for Python package to work. PyDumpy also relies on mysqladmin to do the actual dumping.

PyDumpy is very simple to use. For example to dump a maximum of 50 000 rows from each table type:

./pydumpy.py -H host -u user -p pass -n dbname -limit=50000

PyDumpy also allows to specify row limits and sorting preferences for each table specifically:

./pydumpy.py -H host -u user -p pass -n dbname -limit=50000 –ask-to-limit –ask-to-sort

If you find this tool useful please feel free to provide feedback by leaving a comment.

Nevertheless i decided to atleast try and see if i would be able to build it and maybe change something, run some tests. As I am a Windows user i found out the only way for me to build Drizzle is through Cygwin. I started with installing the latest stable version of Cygwin 1.5.25-15. I must say that their installer is really nice but i would offer to add a package search feature. Might help when you want to install numerous packages.

So what’s next? I found this wiki page about building drizzle and figured first thing i should do is get Bazaar. I installed the following packages using Cygwin installer:

• bison
• bzr
• gettext
• readline
• libpcre0
• pcre
• pcre-devel
• libtoolize
• gperf
• e2fsprogs

And then went on to get the Drizzle sources:

mkdir ~/bzrwork
bzr init-repo ~/bzrwork
cd ~/bzrwork
bzr branch lp:drizzle

Now onto building. Here’s where all the fun begins.

Drizzle requires a tool named libevent which is not available through Cygwin installer and you must build it yourself. And still you can’t build libevent with the latest version of Cygwin because it lacks certain functionality. After some googling i found a patched IPV6 version of Cygwin that fixes these issues. Added the #define EAI_SYSTEM 11 to http.c and finally were able to ./configure && make && make install libevent.

You also need protobuf installed. And there’s no package for that either. Actually this protobuf is quite nice stuff. Protocol Buffers are a way of encoding structured data in an efficient yet extensible format. Google uses Protocol Buffers for almost all of its internal RPC protocols and file formats.

Now that we seem to have all the packages installed we can start building drizzle. It should be as easy as this:

cd drizzle
./config/autorun.sh
./configure
make
make install

It is not. First to be able to compile Drizzle you need to have gcc4. And even if you do, ./configure must need to know where it is. So we need to use additional flags CC and CXX. Then you need to show ./configure where libevent is installed by adding a flag –with-libevent-prefix=/usr/local or any other place you have it in. I also found a really ugly problem with warnings. I wasn’t able to compile drizzle because it stopped somwhere in gnulib complaining about some warnings that were treated as errors. Funny enough there is a sarcastic option to disable these warnings: –disable-pedantic-warnings. You also probably want to install Drizzle somwhere else than usual by using:  –prefix=/some/deploy/dir.

In the end you come up with something like this: 

./configure CC=gcc-4 CXX=g++-4 –with-libevent-prefix=/usr/local –disable-pedantic-warnings –prefix=/some/deploy/dir

That’s how far i’ve got with it. Though i’m still not able to compile it.  I get an error somwhere in mystrings library that is related to some datatype casting issues. Hopefully i’ll be able to hack through this

Allow only those UPDATE and DELETE statements that specify which rows to modify by using key values. If you have set this option in an option file, you can override it by using –safe-updates on the command line.

This option is an alias of “–safe-upfates”. I wonder for a while what is the story behind having two alternate names for the same thing. Maybe it’s just the MySQL folks having some fun.

It is also nice too see that there are some thoughts to merge XtraDB into Drizzle.