Thursday, July 22, 2010

PBMS version 0.5.015 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 doesn't contain any major new features just some bug fixes and a lot of house keeping changes.

If you look at the download section on http://www.blobstreaming.org you will see that there are now more packages that can be downloaded. I have separated out different client side components from the PBMS project and created separate launchPad projects for each one. You can see them listed in the "Related Links" side panel to the right of this post.

  • The "PBMS Client Library" facilitates communication with the PBMS daemon. This library is independent of the PBMS daemon's host server and can be used to communicate with a PBMS daemon hosted by the MySQL or Drizzle database servers.
  • The "PBMS PHP extension" is a PHP module that enables PHP to connect directly to the PBMS engine and stream BLOB data in and out of a MySQL or Drizzle database.
  • The "Streaming enabled JDBC Driver" is a streaming enable version of the standard MySQL Connector/J, JDBC Driver.
One minor new feature that was added is that the PBMS HTTP server how understands the HTTP "range" header that can be used to request a section of BLOB data. The Client Library and PHP extension have both been updated with pbms_get_data_range() functions.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

PBMS is in the Drizzle tree!

If you haven't already heard PBMS is now part of the Drizzle tree.

Getting it there was a fair bit of work but not as much as I had thought it would be. The process of getting it to work with Drizzle and running it thorough Hudson has improved the code a lot. It is amazing what some compilers will catch that others will let by. I am now a firm believer in treating all compiler warnings as errors.

I am just in the process of updating the PBMS plugin so that it will build and install the PBMS client library (libpbmscl.so) as well as the plugin. The PBMS client library is a standalone library that can be used to access the PBMS daemon weather it is running as part of MySQL or Drizzle. So a PBMS client library built with Drizzle can be used to access a PBMS daemon running as part of MySQL and vice-versa.

There is also PHP extension for PBMS that is basically just a wrapper for the library. Currently this is part of the PBMS project on launchpad but I am working on getting it into pecl. The PHP extension has a set of test cases with it which is what I use to test PBMS with.

If anybody is interested in taking on the task of creating a python module for PBMS I would be happy to provide what ever help you may need. I think it would just be a wrapper around the PBMS client library almost identical to the PHP extension. I would recoment just taking the PHP extension and converting it.

Now that I have PBMS in Drizzle I am planning on getting replication working with PBMS. I have decided that the best way to do this is to do a bit of work rearranging how PBMS uses the BLOB URLs to reference the BLOB data. The URLs already contain a server, database, and table id so the plan is to change things so that PBMS can handle BLOB URLS from other servers being inserted or referenced. Once this is working then I will automatically have replication and 95% of what is needed to support clustered servers.

I will go into detail on this in a later posting which will include pretty pictures.

Barry