PBMS version 0.5.011 beta has been released.

A new release of the PrimeBase Media Streaming daemon is now available for download at
http://www.blobstreaming.org .

This release has been focused on getting S3 storage back into PBMS.

What's new:

• The PBMS daemon now provides two storage methods for BLOB data: local storage and S3 storage. Using S3 storage, repository records are kept for each BLOB the same as in local storage but the actual BLOB data is stored remotely on an S3 server. Click here to see my earlier posting on S3 storage.
• When using S3 storage the PBMS daemon holds the public/private keys but the actual transfer of BLOB data, both upload and download, is done directly between the client application and the S3 server.
• Backup and recovery have been modified to work with S3 storage so that BLOBs stored on S3 servers are backed up on the S3 server. To find out more about this click here to go to a previous BLOG entry on this subject.
  
• The PBMS enabled MySQL java connector has been updated and is now working again.
  
• The PrimeBase Media Streaming web site has been updated and the documentation has been made more user friendly.
• A new system table was added to the 'pbms' database called 'pbms_enabled' that lists the pbms enabled engines currently loaded by the MySQL server.
  

As you may have noticed there has been a bit of a name change in that I now refer to the PBMS daemon as apposed to the PBMS engine. Refferring to PBMS as a storage engine was a bit confusing because its main purpose is to act as an independent daemon that handles the transfer of BLOB data to and from clients. The fact that it publishes itself internally in the MySQL server as a storage engine, supports the storage engine interface, and takes part in transactions is all part of the implementation details and is not part of its core purpose.

Speaking of core purposes: The BLOB alias feature has been removed. This feature let the user assign an alias to a BLOB that could then later be used in place of the BLOB URL generated by PBMS to access the BLOB. It was decided that this feature was not part of the PBMS daemon's core purpose and since supporting it in a transactional manner would have added considerable complexity to the PBMS daemon it was dropped.


What's next:

• I really want to get this working with drizzle.
  
• Run some performance tests comparing BLOB handling performance on MySQL with and with out the PBMS daemon and its impact on the over all performance of the MySQL server.
• The performance with S3 is not as good as it should be, the cause of this needs to be found and fixed.