Drupal fiasco

By Josh Waihi, Thursday,30 April, 2009 at 2:48 pm

There is this gig called Drupal (http://Drupal.org). Its an Open Source Content Management System (CMS) - that runs on MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite databases. In its latest development (version 7), Drupal's database layer had a makeover leaving PostgreSQL rather broken and un-use-able. As a result, the community wanted to drop PostgreSQL support.

So we formed a band called the 'PostgreSQL Surge' which I helped lead the charge and prevent PostgreSQL from being ripped out of Drupal 7 and later.

Fixing PostgreSQL support required my own time and dedication - no one who works on Drupal gets paid to do it. Its all heart and passion.

So I went on the 'bug fixing' tour, I'm better known by my rockstar name in the Drupal community, fiasco. I'd write patches till the early hours of the morning and still make it to work the next day on time. Slowly but surely I got the PostgreSQL driver in Drupal to 100%

As a result, I was named as the PostgreSQL maintainer for Drupal alongside 19 other maintainers of other areas. This is published in the MAINTAINERS.txt that comes with every release of Drupal 7.

Drupal is used by more than 150,000+ websites of which, when Drupal 7 is released, those running PostgreSQL would not have been possible without me.

I have no desire to tell the world how great I am because of it, this is not the reason I entered the competition. In September there is a Drupal conference in Paris I wish to go to. Winning this competition would help the funds A LOT!

I could have told you about other cooler stuff, but I'm most proud of helping to ensure the survival of the completely free Drupal stack, which in turn helps enable non-profits, etc.

16 Comments

  1. Jacinta

    11 June, 2009 at 2:31 pm

    Would love to know a little more about who the NZ non-profits are, that use Drupal. Cheers!

  2. Telecom Products

    10 June, 2009 at 10:44 pm

    Rock on Josh!

    besh wishes.

    Telecommunication B2B Leads

  3. Zad

    8 June, 2009 at 6:12 am

    Great! Telecomleads

  4. Jabberhutt

    5 June, 2009 at 9:29 pm

    Rock on Josh! You the man/nerd!

  5. Jo

    5 June, 2009 at 12:18 am

    Awesome to see you win Josh!

  6. Elliot

    29 May, 2009 at 2:29 pm

    Respect. Good that someone is ensuring Drupal will retain a REAL database for Drupal 7.

  7. Brenda (Shiny)

    26 May, 2009 at 4:33 pm

    Fiasco’s contributions to the Drupal project greatly increase the quality of the code base and adherence to SQL standards.

    I hired fiasco as a minion only 2 years ago, and he has proved an incredibly quick learner.

    His contribution to opensource is huge.

  8. Bevan

    25 May, 2009 at 11:16 pm

    Josh’s work on Drupal 7 has been totally awesome. He really deserves this. As well as all the heavy lifting for postgres and the datababase layer in Drupal, Josh also works on some great websites.

    Keep it up Josh and good luck!

    Bevan – Drupal geek.

  9. emi

    21 May, 2009 at 12:49 pm

    Hi all!!
    I now have a MySQL based Drupal 6 installation and want to migrate to PostgreSQL due 2 things: MySQL table corruption issues and my own good and proved PostgreSQL knowledge (not in free software, still).

    I agree with those who say PostgreSQL support is a must to for serious CMSs, and I also thank to Mosh for him hard work. I really want you in Paris!

    I only have a question: Mosh, do you know if Drupal 6 will port all your hard work from Drupal 7?

    Again, thanks a lot, Mosh!!

  10. Larry Garfield

    5 May, 2009 at 10:52 am

    I’m the Drupal 7 database maintainer and principal architect of the Drupal 7 database layer. Amen and amen again! Especially with the uncertainty in the MySQL world right now (Sun, Oracle, I’m so confused!), having solid PostgreSQL support is very important.

    Thanks to the work Josh and others inspired by him, Drupal 7 looks like it will have the most complete and robust PostgreSQL support of any Drupal version, ever. That’s hot. :-)

    Rock on, Josh! It would be awesome to finally get the entire database core team together in Paris.

  11. Damien Tournoud

    5 May, 2009 at 10:40 am

    I’m the co-maintainer of the PostgreSQL driver for Drupal, and can only support Josh’s application here.

    Josh is the only man that stepped up when I (cowardly) suggested to drop support for PostgreSQL, earlier this year. Thanks to his dynamism and willingness, not only have we not dropped PostgreSQL support, but Drupal 7 is fully tested to run reliably on PostgreSQL.

    Mainly thanks to him, Drupal 7 is the only fully-featured content management framework that can really say it supports three database engines: MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite (with more to come later this year). Keep up the great work, Josh, and come see us in Paris.

  12. neofutur

    5 May, 2009 at 10:32 am

    Its really important drupal keeps supporting postgresql, particularly when oracle buys mysql . . . .

    I m still using mysql but i ll probably soon need to migrate to postgresql . . . mysql future being unsure . . .

  13. Angie "webchick" Byron

    2 May, 2009 at 12:57 pm

    I’m the co-maintainer for the Drupal 7 release, and can only back up what Josh “fiasco” Waihi has said.

    As Drupal is a framework upon which other people build applications and social publishing websites, it’s extremely important for Drupal’s database abstraction layer to be robust enough to handle whatever we throw at it. Yet, because Drupal is written in PHP (which has historically been very tied to the MySQL database), the PostgreSQL knowledge within the existing body of Drupal contributors is extremely low. Around December of last year, we were dangerously close to having to drop support for this great database (which is growing even more important now that Oracle has bought Sun and the future of MySQL has a bit of uncertainty around it) because we simply didn’t have the internal knowledge to support it any longer.

    Josh stepped up to the plate in a huge way, fixing critical bugs that lead to literally thousands of test failures in PostgreSQL, and identifying and fixing numerous bugs in the database abstraction layer along the way. But while the bugs he personally fixed were impressive, even more impressive was that he stepped into the role of maintainer and managed in the process to start a “movement,” of sorts. This has resulted in a small but growing segment of our core developers who now use daily, and more importantly care about, PostgreSQL. This will hopefully mean that we never find ourselves in the situation again of it languishing behind MySQL support.

    Drupal 7 is looking to be an incredibly amazing release, with better enterprise support than any version before it, and Josh’s tremendous efforts are no small part in that.

    I would love for Josh to be able to come to Drupalcon so we can all buy him a beverage of choice to thank him for his hard work. :)

  14. courtney

    30 April, 2009 at 4:09 pm

    Good for you buddy! I’m sure you’ll get there ;-)

  15. Dave Reid

    30 April, 2009 at 4:00 pm

    Fiasco has been a very vital part of Drupal’s database development and its often-overshadowed db compatibility. It’s dirty work helping to support PostgreSQL in a world of MySQLers, but his work will continue to let Drupal grow and help people it couldn’t before. In other words, he rocks!

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