Hi Kristian On 28/09/2009, at 8:16 PM, Kristian Nielsen wrote:

Arjen Lentz writes:

...

Re NDB... the NDB in the source tree may not be production capable, but it's technically functional. Builds for Ubuntu tend to include NDB, and it actually works (I've used it in training classes). So that's already the real world.

MariaDB may also consider a magic merge solution with the actual NDB 6.whatever tree, as mixed setups (NDB and other engines) are perfectly common and sensible in various deployment scenarios. You then need the up-to date InnoDB stuff and binlog/replication fixes, as well as the server-side NDB infrastructure with enhancements and bugfixes. In short, a merge - at least that's what I can tell, someone please correct me if I'm wrong. I appreciate it might be a difficult thing to do.

When I discussed NDB with Monty back in February, we basically agreed to focus our efforts elsewhere than NDB. That is the reason it is not maintained in MariaDB, rather than any particular technical issues.

NDB is actually the part of the MySQL server I know best (I worked on it as a developer for two years), so we do have the skills required to maintain it. But my own impression is that there just is not the interest from the community for this. Yes, I see many that show interest after hearing of NDB, but few (if any) that actually start to use it once they learn of the difficulties and limitations.

As far as I understand, Sun/MySQL is not really maintaining NDB in 5.1 either, at least when I was there 1 1/2 year ago all efforts went into the - telco versions, which are based on a separate source tree from MySQL 5.1. Maybe these days they are even based on MySQL 6.0, the development tree used to have this base.

So it seems to me that maintaining NDB as part of MariaDB would be too much effort, at too little gain. Of course, if this assumption turns out to be wrong, we can revisit the decision.

Ubuntu has been building with it, which is at least useful for training and education. If we build without, we break backwards compatibility, and that prevents uptake by users. Like it or not, we have to be a superset - we only build this on Ubuntu, but nevertheless we need it. It has to at least work build and start. It does not have to be pretty. Re NDB in general, I used to share your opinion, however more recent developments in the telco tree make it usable for a broader audience. (running on Sean Pringle's opinion for that - you've met. Works for OQ now) That might make a merge-in from the telco tree interesting to look at, not right now (just time considerations). Regards, Arjen. -- Arjen Lentz, Exec.Director @ Open Query (http://openquery.com) Exceptional Services for MySQL at a fixed budget. Follow our blog at http://openquery.com/blog/ OurDelta: enhanced builds for MySQL @ http://ourdelta.org