Learning Drizzle

After being gone a while for the day job I have finally gotten around to setting up my storage file locations and permissions in Drizzle. Stuart Smith helped me get past some problems, mostly associated with not knowing basic syntax, but I also ran into one or two that are due to changes ongoing in Drizzle. After spending a lot of time not knowing what I didn’t know (one of the quirks of teaching yourself), a little chat finally straightened me out.

So after Drizzle is installed on Ubuntu you obviously have to have a place to store your data. To avoid all the time we spent figuring out what was going on, just pay attention to the last lines after you run your “make install” so you know where the damn thing is.

Run your sudo command then add your user group where drizzle is the name of the group you want to have access to the drizzle server:

$ sudo groupadd drizzle

then create a new user within that group, replacing USER with your user name.

$ sudo useradd -g drizzle USER

After running this procedure a couple times I found that on one install the directory was created for me, on another I had to create it. Either way, make sure you have a new directory for drizzle and then a data directory in that:

$ sudo mkdir /home/USER/drizzle
$ sudo mkdir /home/USER/drizzle/data

Now set up the permission on that directory for your user:

$ sudo chown -R drizzle:USER /home/drizzle/data

Finally start up the Drizzle Server with:

$ sudo -u USER /usr/local/sbin/drizzled --datadir=/home/USER/drizzle/data

You should get a bunch of lines of code saying the Drizzle server and InnoDB are now running and what ports it is listening too. Now you can start up the Drizzle Client:

sudo -u USER /usr/local/bin/drizzle

and you should see:

Welcome to the Drizzle client.. Commands end with ; or \g.
Your Drizzle connection id is 1
Server version: 2009.12.1251 Source distribution (drizzle)
Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.
drizzle>

I found that if I installed this on a server that already had MySQL running on it, the start up command would return an error where the InnoDB (a storage engine drizzle uses) was already using the port that Drizzle wanted to use. I had to shut down MySQL on port 3306 to get it up and running. Mark Atwood helped me get past that issue.

Everything seemed to work much cleaner installing on a clean system but that I guess is to be expected. I don’t know all the ways Drizzle will overlap and conflict with other programs and I expect MySQL is the first and most frequent one I will notice.

I fancy myself an astute computer user but some of the ways to get things running in Linux are challenging for a born-and-raised windows user like myself. You don’t just click on a button to install Drizzle. I ran into a few blocks, that can mostly be attributed to me tripping over my self.

For the noobie,  make sure you run all of this from the root user which means you will see a $ sign after your user name. for example, my command line starts with: kent@server:-$.

Jauder Ho had a great walk-through that I am going to steal and re-post here, with a couple alterations only for the sake of clarity and a minor change due to dependencies. His text is in red:

The Drizzle wiki was useful in getting started but did not include all of the available packages.

First, the basic dependencies:

sudo apt-get install libpcre3-dev libevent-dev autoconf automake
bison libtool ncurses-dev libreadline-dev libz-dev g++
libssl-dev uuid-dev libpam0g libpam0g-dev gperf

Next, the libevent on 8.04 is too old so a newer version needs to be installed. Did this on 9.04 too just to make sure it is up-to-date.

sudo apt-get install libevent-dev

Google’s Protocol Buffers as well as libdrizzle need to be installed and the packages are available on the drizzle-developers PPA on Launchpad.

Google  Protocol Buffers is a bit more of an issue. I got an error later on that said protobuf was out of date. You need to go here to get a concise walkthrough to update your software sources on Ubuntu Desktop.

***Amendment*** if you are running Ubuntu Server (which is probably the ultimate goal) you need to access your repositories by running the following command: sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list. Then you can add the lines as the sources walk-through suggests***

Add the PPA to your software sources, add the key and then run the following:

sudo apt-get install libprotobuf-dev protobuf-compiler

Then:

sudo aptitude install libdrizzle-dev

I was beating my head against a wall for a while trying to install libdrizzle. I kept trying to run sudo apt-get install on libdrizzle-dev but for some reason that didn’t work. Then I did sudo aptitude install and it worked fine. If anyone can tell me why, that would be great. Aside from that Jauder’s walk through worked fine.

*** Amendment, some people mentioned that I forgot to let you know to install Bazaar to compile Drizzle as well as make. Those commands are:”sudo apt-get install bzr” and “sudo apt-get install make“***

Now it’s time to finally download, compile, and install Drizzle. Run the following commands:

bzr branch lp:drizzle
cd drizzle
./config/autorun.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install

You should now have Drizzle installed on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. If you have an problems or see a way to make anything more concise or clear please tell me.

I did find a few things in the wiki that could be made more clear for us noobies. I will get on that.

I actually spent a lot of time doing this the hard way before I found Jauder’s succinct walk-through and will elaborate in the next post.  Next time I will be setting up my user accounts and beginning testing.