MariaDB non-blocking client API and node.js

Last Summer I implemented a non-blocking client API in MariaDB, and it was included in the MariaDB 5.5 release. But somehow I never got around to announcing it.

However, that did not prevent Brian White from noticing it, and using it to implement a new mysql binding for node.js called mariasql.

Now, node.js is a single-threaded, event-driven framework for web application sever development. In such frameworks, all I/O is done non-blocking or asynchronously, as are all other actions that may need to wait for external events. There is a single event loop which uses a poll() or similar system call to wait for any pending I/O or other event to complete, and then dispatches the appropriate event handler(s). …

Setting up a new MariaDB Buildbot host

Yesterday I set up a new machine for our MariaDB Buildbot. This is quite an important build host for us, it runs more than 20 different builds for each push into our most important trees, and is the host that builds most of our release packages. So quite a workhorse! It is a pretty fast machine, with 5 SSD disks, 48GB of RAM and 2 x quad-core Intel Xeon E5420.

This is a replacement for the previous machine serving the same builds. The previous machine was also nice, at least on paper, with no less than 24 cores. …