Opinions, Expertise, Passion.

Before today, Drizzle was known as a light form of rain found in Seattle (among other places). Not any more. If you have not read the news already today, Drizzle, Clouds, “What If?” is the new kid on the RDBMS bock.

Faster, leaner and designed with the original goals of ease-of-use, reliability and performance, Drizzle will make an impact in those organizations that are seeking a viable database storage solution for large scalable applications. The key to Drizzle is several fold. First, the crud has been removed. The first part of Drizzle development is to remove bloat or non functioning software from the MySQL tree. In fact if you monitor the commits, it reads like, this has been removed, these files have been deleted, this code has been refactored, this new library has been introduced. Design decisions that have limited MySQL’s development for years are being simply cast aside.

The current landscape has become more complicated in 2008. You have the official MySQL releases, 5.0 is becoming ancient (being released almost 3 years ago), 5.1 is now clearly a lame duck, no release date for past few years, (the internal joke was 5.1 will be released in Q2, but the year is unspecified). 6.0 is in identity crisis with beta parts in alpha. These versions are moving so slowly, they are moving towards extinction like the dinosaurs. Monty Widenius is working solidly on Maria (and unofficial MySQL 5.1 branch), probably more stable and possibly released before 5.1. MySQL cluster has gone it’s own way, it was shackled by the 5.1 legacy and simply couldn’t wait for a GA product.

Jim Starkey (creator of Falcon, the new 6.0 storage engine) now is working in the clouds with Nimbus DB. Dorsal Source is lying dormant, Proven Scaling has it’s enterprise binaries and now Percona has it’s own patched ports. You have strong patches from Google and eBay that have zero hope of every being introduced into the official MySQL releases, probably until 7.x (5.1 and 6.0 have been frozen for a long time). Innodb from Oracle invested heavily in new features in a 5.1 plugin, announced at the MySQL Conference, broken in 1 day by MySQL releasing a new RC version making it in-compatible. Kickfire and Infobright have their own hacked versions, and Nitro DB I suspect have just given up waiting (now like 2 years).

With Sun’s acquisition now at T+6 months, cash and resources doesn’t appear to have helped with the official product. The single greatest movement in this period is that MySQL is now hosted under Launchpad, enabling anybody to access the source code, and even create branches like Jim Winstead reported. However I doubt you will see this helping code getting in the mainline product, but at least it will be more visible. This was an initiative long before the Sun acquisition, and indeed is against Sun policy of using Mercurial.

So why is Drizzle going to be any different or better?

You start with a committed list of contributors from already 6-7 different organizations. The clear goals of simplification, to make it faster and scale better on multi-core servers echo the work being done. You have developers who work in real world situations, not just coders for many years without experiencing operational use, and you have zero sales and marketing getting in the way. Removal of incomplete or stagnant functionality is key for the alpha version and includes stored procedures, triggers, prepared statements, query cache, extra data types, full-text, timezones etc is just the start.

Being small and nimble will enable Drizzle to develop and release code in much shorter iterations. You will see new developments allowing far greater plugin support via the new modularity approach and far better coding standards, making expert knowledge of how MySQL internals work a lesser requirement to contribute.

Will it fizzle, will it dazzle? Drizzle has the potential to be a stellar product. I’m a supporter and I hope to contribute in some small way.

References

• Wikipedia - Drizzle Database
• Drizzle at Launchpad
• Drizzle Wiki

About the Author

Ronald Bradford provides Consulting and Advisory Services in Data Architecture, Performance and Scalability for MySQL Solutions. An IT industry professional for two decades with extensive database experience in MySQL, Oracle and Ingres his expertise covers data architecture, software development, migration, performance analysis and production system implementations. His knowledge from 10 years of consulting across many industry sectors, technologies and countries has provided unique insight into being able to provide solutions to problems. For more information Contact Ronald.

Following Marten Mickos, the second opening keynote at the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo was by Jonathan Schwartz CEO and President of Sun Microsystems. Blog

His opening joke was about dinner with Marten, to which Marten said “You not going to get a keynote, unless you buy the company.”

So what was striking for me in his presentation “What is Sun’s Agenda?”

• There is no open-source phone yet, but that’s an industry that needs disrupting.
• Like the need for water or electricity, The Network Has Become A Social Utility.
• We want to work with the community, create greater innovation.
• The future, the price tag of Free, the philosophy of Freedom

I had a chance to meet Jonathan and Rich Green on Sunday night, and it was great to see Jonathan learning about, and getting behind the product PBXT - The Community Engine a MySQL 5.1 open source engine.

Well at least your MySQL database world.

As Paul eluded to, PrimeBase Technologies has a project to provide synchronous replication for MySQL in a High Availability environment. It is more then an idea, there is a plan.

Is it possible?
What are the use cases?
How can you use it?
Would you use it?

Some input to date. We need these questions and more, and we seeking more input for discussion.

Unfortunately the opportunity to hear any input during a presentation is left to the last day of the conference, so there has been created a BoF session on Tuesday night for a round table discussion if necessary. People are encouraged to bring specific cases and situations for feedback, the reasons why MySQL Replication, MySQL Cluster, DRBD/HeatBeat or any other solution does not satisfy your needs, and what would.

If you can’t wait you may need to seek out Booth #518, and make a time to seek out the Technology Expert.

Just today, Peter Zaitsev of MySQL Performance Blog also writes in State of MySQL Market and will Replication live ?, “Customers are constantly asking me if there is something which would help them to scale MySQL and get some HA out of the box even on the medium level. Seriously - MySQL Cluster, Continuent, Master-Master Replication, DRBD or SAN based HA architectures all have their limits which makes neither of them used for very wide class of applications.” to confirm this pursuit.

I’ll be following closely the progression of Storage Engines available in the MySQL Database server, well soon to be available when 5.1 gets to GA (hopefully by end of Q2 which is what we have been told). Tick, Tick, time is running out.

PrimeBase XT (PBXT) and Blob Streaming is a focus as PrimeBase Technologies, the company which I want to note for people is an Open Source company, committed at providing an open source alternative to the other commercial players. You also have at the MySQL Conference talks on the the existing InnoDB from Innobase (a subsidiary of market RDBMS leader Oracle). There is a Nitro presentation, an Infobright presentation, no Solid presentation surprisingly (the IBM news happening after submissions closed). We also have from MySQL, presentations on the internally developed storage engines Falcon and Maria, both products that won’t even be in 5.1 but 6.0, however Maria is presently a different branch of 5.1 so I don’t know how that works. Will it be in 5.1?

But what I want to seek is more news of KickFire, a Diamond Sponsor, an engine with embedded H/W, something that’s been obviously worked on in reasonable stealth. For me it’s not just interesting, it’s a competitor in our technology space, so I’ve been researching Joseph Chamdani and some of his patents.

Plenty of news in the past few weeks on Kickfire including Kickfire Update by Keith Murphy on April 3, Kickfire: stream-processing SQL queries by Baron Schwartz on April 4, Kickfire looking to push MySQL limits by Farhan Mashraqi on April 4, and Kickfire Kickfire Kickfire by Peter Zaitsev on April 4, and myself back on March 23.

So what can I make from the lack of company information and posted information to date.

• Hardware based acceleration.
• No Solid State Drive (SSD) Technology, at least not yet but C2App mentions SSD.
• Data Warehousing, lending to thinking it’s not a transactional storage engine
• A new storage engine and a new approach to data storage. I find this surprising, as it takes years to develop a feature complete storage engine, and most new 5.1 storage engines are indeed existing products, take Nitro, Solid, Infobright and Falcon. Only PBXT has been written from the ground up for MySQL 5.1, so looking to know more about it’s development
• Expensive, it’s dedicated H/W + (assuming) MySQL Enterprise + Storage Engine

Here I am at my desk sporting the PrimeBase supporters t-shirt that will be available at the exhibitors booth at the 2008 MySQL Conference. The front is rather uneventful with the official logo, but the back will be worth the experience. So everybody interested in supporting PBXT as the transactional storage engine for MySQL developed by the community and for the community, please come and see us and mention the secret password.

We have been placed way back in the right hand side of the exhibitors hall at booth 518, in front of the Open Source and OEM providers.

Continuing on from my lightning visits with Jan Kneschke and Michael Zinner, today I got to spend a day with Paul McCullagh at his home in Hamburg Germany.

Paul is the architect of the PBXT Pluggable Storage Engine for MySQL 5.1, and also the Blob Streaming Storage Engine. His work was acknowledged with the MySQL Community contributor for the year in 2007. The successful PrimeBase product for the publishing Industry in Europe and North America also now uses PBXT for underlying data storage which is great to see a company use it’s own products.

Like each friend and expert this week, Paul develops using Mac, but at least uses the US English version & keyboard layout, not the German layout. As Paul states, “the German version is not productive for coding”.

Paul uses NetNewsWire Lite as his RSS feeder, as I observe some PlanetMySQL links. I’m more old school, I just go to the site every few days. I really should move from the dark ages, one advantage is the RSS feeder shows you what you have read.

However, there is a particular reason why I visited Paul, other then to spend some time with a good friend. I’m doing more investigation regarding making coding changes to MySQL, and I’m very out of the development cycle. I’ve forgotten more then I remember with C++ and in particular the tools and techniques used to develop, debug and deploy. Of course I know what I need to do, I just need to know what now is the most efficient means of doing today.

Paul uses Xcode to view and edit his MySQL code. The development environment provided by Apple is good for Java and C++. As an Eclipse person from my Java days, I was using CDT for my C++ environment. XCode is used for project management (i.e. looking at files in project) and for file editing. A standard terminal is used to do make. Xcode can do a quick compile for syntax checking and you get a list of errors and hot links to lines of code.

The next key part is debugging, and you can very easily define executables and enable you to run in an integrated debugger. A good option testing is to run mysql test with is –manual-gdb. This gives you the command you can run. What Paul does it copy the parameters, and add to an executable defined within XCode, the arguments from the –manual-gdb output.

The MySQL source tree was added as a project but only partial source directories such as (storage,sql,include) are required. You do need to make sure it does compile (but necessary for a build via Xcode.)

Additional debugging help is In xcode you can do jump to variable definition. So you can add breakpoints, and then run the defined executable that was build via command line make, and copy mysqld binary to initially deployed directory.

Regarding testing, we got to talk again about the issues with the MySQL Test Suite including the issues I encountered while working with Nitro. Hard coded storage engine syntax such as such as engine type=Innodb make testing more complicated then necessary. MySQL test requires some modifications for pluggable storage engines. You need to add a row to the plugins table via mysql_system_tables_data.sql to enable –default-storage-engine=pbxt as a command line argument. Paul did state that on using the MySQL testing suite, the Perl version is a great improvement in performance.

So now I understand the environment, I get onto my problem, and we are specifically looking at the thread sort_buffer and sql/filesort.cc

So when I ask about a few lines of specific code, Paul shakes his head, and says “This looks crazy”. After we spend some time on it, his comment is upgraded, “this doesn’t look crazy, it is crazy. When you look at the effect of the code, it appears it can be done in 3 lines, and it would make sense what it is doing.” This is worth further discussion in a future post.

One last tip learned. You need to be careful with multiple versions and open projects of the same, not to make changes 1/2 in one version and 1/2 in another version.

Top marks to Jay Pipes for getting the Forge 2.0 finally out after quite some time, as well as in the midst of the MySQL Conference he is organizing.

I am worried however about some of the content, as shown in the screenshot below, the opening page lists Worklog tasks/features for versions 6.x or 7.x , that’s ok, but features in 9.x. Where is the practicality of thinking more then 2 releases ahead, and just having a future bucket. Indeed, we have 5.1 and 6.0 already frozen and not releases, so 6.x is already 3 releases out.

Tonight we were told at the NY PHP Meeting MySQL 5.1 is not due to late Q2, so that’s at least June 2008.
The MySQL 5.1 Release Notes reveals a history that I don’t find very flattering.

• MySQL 5.1.3 (29 November 2005)
• MySQL 5.1.9 (12 April 2006) *First reported beta via docs
• MySQL 5.1.22 (24 September 2007: Release Candidate)

I hope that Sun will take on board this very slow release cycle of producing GA products, the last version MySQL 5.0.15 (19 October 2005: Production) 2 years and 6 months ago.

I’m even more interested then previously in the ultimate release and success of MySQL 5.1 as this is a pre-requisite of my new employer’s key product the PBXT Storage Engine for MySQL.

I am a very strong proponent of Open Source (excluding my Macbook). Joining MySQL Inc was a wonderful achievement, being part of the team behind the most popular open source database. Leaving MySQL was not an easy decision due to the people, but the Sun transition and requirements did help. However it is no surprise I am joining another open source company - Primebase Technologies in Hamburg, Germany. My association with the MySQL Community will only be strengthened with my full work and support behind the PBXT and Blob Streaming pluggable storage engines for MySQL.

It is actually poetic that I am joing Primebase for I have the auspicious recognition while an active part of the MySQL community of introducing Paul McCullagh to MySQL some 2 years ago. Only weeks later, PBXT was MySQL news in the opening CEO keynote my Marten Mickos at the 2006 MySQL Users Conference.

I expect this opportunity will increase my contributions, in particular in the lacking areas of instrumentation and memory management. As well I will now be focusing my efforts on MySQL 5.1 and ensuring this is of the highest quality for the MySQL Community. While my open source code contributions have been small to date, my first some years ago adding in JMeter support for MySQL Stored procedures and Transactions, the feeling of seeding instead of leaching is a wonderful thing. I look forward to a greater opportunity with the team at Primebase Technologies.

As I mentioned in MySQL Conference - Rewarding the Community, Paul McCullagh, the creator of the Community Transactional Storage Engine PBXT won the Community Code Contributor of the Year award.

A photo for Paul. Great work.

Paul has released Version 0.95 of his PBXT MySQL Transactional Storage Engine.

Here is what I did to get it operational under CentOS 4.3.

su -
useradd pbxt
su - pbxt
wget http://www.primebase.com/xt/download/mysql-4.1.16-pbxt-0.9.5.tar.gz
tar xvfz mysql-4.1.16-pbxt-0.9.5.tar.gz
cd mysql-4.1.16-pbxt-0.9.5
./configure --with-debug=full --with-pbxt-storage-engine --without-query-cache --with-mysqld-user=pbxt  --prefix=/home/pbxt/mysql
make
make install
scripts/mysql_install_db
cd /home/pbxt/mysql
./bin/mysqld_safe --user=pbxt --basedir=/home/pbxt/mysql &

Now, lets test and confirm PBXT is operational.

bin/mysql -uroot mysql
Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A

Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 1 to server version: 4.1.16-pbxt-0.9.5-debug

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> show engines;
+------------+---------+------------------------------------------------------------+
| Engine     | Support | Comment                                                    |
+------------+---------+------------------------------------------------------------+
| MyISAM     | DEFAULT | Default engine as of MySQL 3.23 with great performance     |
| HEAP       | YES     | Alias for MEMORY                                           |
| MEMORY     | YES     | Hash based, stored in memory, useful for temporary tables  |
| MERGE      | YES     | Collection of identical MyISAM tables                      |
| MRG_MYISAM | YES     | Alias for MERGE                                            |
| ISAM       | NO      | Obsolete storage engine, now replaced by MyISAM            |
| MRG_ISAM   | NO      | Obsolete storage engine, now replaced by MERGE             |
| InnoDB     | YES     | Supports transactions, row-level locking, and foreign keys |
| INNOBASE   | YES     | Alias for INNODB                                           |
| BDB        | NO      | Supports transactions and page-level locking               |
| BERKELEYDB | NO      | Alias for BDB                                              |
| NDBCLUSTER | NO      | Clustered, fault-tolerant, memory-based tables             |
| NDB        | NO      | Alias for NDBCLUSTER                                       |
| EXAMPLE    | NO      | Example storage engine                                     |
| ARCHIVE    | NO      | Archive storage engine                                     |
| CSV        | NO      | CSV storage engine                                         |
| BLACKHOLE  | NO      | Storage engine designed to act as null storage             |
| PBXT       | YES     | Super fast transactional, row-level locking engine         |
+------------+---------+------------------------------------------------------------+
18 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Now to take if for a spin with the MySQL Sakila Sample Database. At this time I need a modified version of the schema, as the sample database is designed for Version 5.

Download sakila.mysql4 script.
Download sakila.pbxt.sql script.

bin/mysql -uroot mysql
mysql>  source sakila.mysql4
mysql> source  sakila.pbxt.sql
# NOTE: Alter table of film_text fails as expected due to FULLTEXT index
mysql> show create table actor;
mysql> exit;

A few warnings in my sakila.mysql4 script I’ll need to review, but it looks ok from an installation step. Now back to my tests that I’m writing to use the Sakila Sample Database which I was working on, so I can really test the ACID state and performance of PBXT.

Here are some steps involved. Using the current MySQL defacto engine InnoDB. Of course, Falcon, PBXT and others will enable alternative engines to be used.

Convert Table Storage Engine Types

$ mysql -u[user] -p[password] [database] -e “SHOW TABLES” | grep -v “Tables_in” | sed -e “s/^/ALTER TABLE /” | sed -e “s/$/ ENGINE=InnoDB;/” > upgrade.sql
$ mysql -u[user] -p[password] [database] < upgrade.sql

NOTE: This may not work for all tables, for example those with FULLTEXT indexes will fail.

For the introduction of Referential Integrity we need to ensure the following.

• Each Foreign Key column should have an index. Prior to 4.1 I think this was a requirement, however it’s a good general practice regardless for SQL performance.
• The datatype must match between Primary Key and Foreign Keys. The most obvious oversight is normally UNSIGNED, however you also for example have INT and INT, and not INT and BIGINT as datatypes.
• Optional Foreign Keys must contain NULL values and not the normal practice of having a default of 0.

A Sample Foreign Key Syntax.

mysql> ALTER TABLE wp_usermeta ADD FOREIGN KEY usermeta_user_fk (user_id) REFERENCES wp_user(id);
ERROR 1005 (HY000): Can't create table './wordpress/#sql-cd9_10.frm' (errno: 150)

A closer investigation of what this error really is:

$ perror 150
MySQL error code 150: Foreign key constraint is incorrectly formed

A confirmation of table definitions.

mysql> desc wp_usermeta;
+------------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field      | Type                | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+------------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| umeta_id   | bigint(20)          |      | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
| user_id    | bigint(20) unsigned |      | MUL | 0       |                |
| meta_key   | varchar(255)        | YES  | MUL | NULL    |                |
| meta_value | longtext            | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
+------------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
4 rows in set (0.00 sec)

 mysql> desc wp_users;
+---------------------+---------------------+------+-----+---------------------+----------------+
| Field               | Type                | Null | Key | Default             | Extra          |
+---------------------+---------------------+------+-----+---------------------+----------------+
| id                  | bigint(20) unsigned |      | PRI | NULL                | auto_increment |
| user_login          | varchar(60)         |      | UNI |                     |                |
| user_pass           | varchar(64)         |      |     |                     |                |
| user_nicename       | varchar(50)         |      |     |                     |                |
| user_email          | varchar(100)        |      |     |                     |                |
| user_url            | varchar(100)        |      |     |                     |                |
| user_registered     | datetime            |      |     | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 |                |
| user_activation_key | varchar(60)         |      |     |                     |                |
| user_status         | int(11)             |      |     | 0                   |                |
| display_name        | varchar(250)        |      |     |                     |                |
+---------------------+---------------------+------+-----+---------------------+----------------+
10 rows in set (0.00 sec)

A second pair of eyes (thanks Jon), showed that I actually spelt a table name wrong. Did you spot it. Of course it would have been nice if the error message actually told me this. This rather bland message Can’t create table could actually mean.

• missing index (pre 4.1)
• incompatible columns data types
• Invalid Table.

I’m sure if I tried to break it I’d find more examples, but just a trap for unsuspecting people.

Now migrating an existing schema to using Referential Integrity provides some initial benefits (row level locking, misplaced key updates/deletes) but it does not provide true integrity unless your application has been written to support transactions. Chances are it hasn’t, but this is at least the first step.

Round 2. Question 2? From the MySQL Quiz Show. (you had to be there)

In having a discussion with Paul McCullagh (the creator of PBXT transactional storage engine) and Taneli Otala MySQL AB CTO after the keynote presentation at the MySQL User Conference, Taneli made the following comment (paraphrased and reproduced with permission).

“I talk about PBXT in discussions shamelessly. The development of PBXT was excellent timing in the MySQL community landscape”.

It was an excellent commendation that MySQL AB management considered so highly the contributions from the community. As mentioned in the opening keynote, MySQL with the Storage Engine API with MySQL 5.1 has great potential to expand what options are available to user of MySQL.

Good work Paul. I like many others wish you the best in your continued development and contribution.

Mike writes a good summary of the MySQL Conference opening keynote State of the Dolphin: Interview with Kaj, Monty and David of MySQL.

I’d like to add just two comments.

Firstly, it was great to see community awards to Giuseppe, Roland, Marcus and Rasmus. Well done!

Second, it was a great thing to see on the slides a reference to Paul’s PBXT Transactional Storage Engine. A MySQL storage engine from the community. I’ve had a chance to meet Paul and have a number of great discussions with him. I wish him all the best, and I’m happy to contribute what I can to see his engine make it into the MySQL product in the future.

As part of my using JMeter for the purpose of testing a new Transactional storage engine PBXT for MySQL, I’ve been investigating the best approach for handling transactions. Read more about earlier decisions at my earlier post Testing a new MySQL Transactional Storage Engine.

I found that the JMeter JDBC Sampler only supports SELECT and UPDATE Statements, and not calls to stored procedures. This is just one approach I’m considering taking.

Well, I guess it’s time to contribute code to an Apache Project. I’ve modified code and logged bugs before for Tomcat, but this will be my first attempt of modify code and submit.

A summary of what I did (really for my own short term memory):

• Read the guidelines at http://jakarta.apache.org/site/guidelines.html
• Join the DevelopersList at http://jakarta.apache.org/site/mail2.html#JMeter (Subscribe)
• Review Source Code Repository Guidelines at http://www.apache.org/dev/version-control.html
• Checkout code SVN Trunk Online View
• Make the Changes I wanted
• Submit SVN patch changes to the Developer List

Now I just have to wait to see if it’s accepted. Regardless, it works for me. And that’s Open Source. FREEDOM

svn checkout http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/jakarta/jmeter/trunk/ jmeter


$ svn diff JDBCSampler.java > JDBCSampler.java.patch
$ cat  JDBCSampler.java.patch
Index: JDBCSampler.java
===================================================================
--- JDBCSampler.java    (revision 388876)
+++ JDBCSampler.java    (working copy)
@@ -23,6 +23,7 @@
 import java.sql.ResultSetMetaData;
 import java.sql.SQLException;
 import java.sql.Statement;
+import java.sql.CallableStatement;

 import org.apache.avalon.excalibur.datasource.DataSourceComponent;
 import org.apache.jmeter.samplers.Entry;
@@ -45,6 +46,8 @@

        public static final String QUERY = "query";
        public static final String SELECT = "Select Statement";
+       public static final String UPDATE = "Update Statement";
+       public static final String STATEMENT = "Call Statement";

        public String query = "";

@@ -69,6 +72,7 @@
                log.debug("DataSourceComponent: " + pool);
                Connection conn = null;
                Statement stmt = null;
+               CallableStatement cs = null;

                try {

@@ -88,14 +92,19 @@
                                        Data data = getDataFromResultSet(rs);
                                        res.setResponseData(data.toString().getBytes());
                                } finally {
-                                       if (rs != null) {
-                                               try {
-                                                       rs.close();
-                                               } catch (SQLException exc) {
-                                                       log.warn("Error closing ResultSet", exc);
-                                               }
-                                       }
+                                       close(rs);
                                }
+                       // execute stored procedure
+                       } else if (STATEMENT.equals(getQueryType())) {
+                               try {
+                                       cs = conn.prepareCall(getQuery());
+                                       cs.execute();
+                                       String results = "Executed";
+                                       res.setResponseData(results.getBytes());
+                               } finally {
+                                       close(cs);
+                               }
+                       // Insert/Update/Delete statement
                        } else {
                                stmt.execute(getQuery());
                                int updateCount = stmt.getUpdateCount();
@@ -112,20 +121,8 @@
                        res.setResponseMessage(ex.toString());
                        res.setSuccessful(false);
                } finally {
-                       if (stmt != null) {
-                               try {
-                                       stmt.close();
-                               } catch (SQLException ex) {
-                                       log.warn("Error closing statement", ex);
-                               }
-                       }
-                       if (conn != null) {
-                               try {
-                                       conn.close();
-                               } catch (SQLException ex) {
-                                       log.warn("Error closing connection", ex);
-                               }
-                       }
+                       close(stmt);
+                       close(conn);
                }

                res.sampleEnd();
@@ -164,6 +161,38 @@
                return data;
        }

+       public static void close(Connection c) {
+               try {
+                       if (c != null) c.close();
+               } catch (SQLException e) {
+                       log.warn("Error closing Connection", e);
+               }
+       }
+
+       public static void close(Statement s) {
+               try {
+                       if (s != null) s.close();
+               } catch (SQLException e) {
+                       log.warn("Error closing Statement", e);
+               }
+       }
+
+       public static void close(CallableStatement cs) {
+               try {
+                       if (cs != null) cs.close();
+               } catch (SQLException e) {
+                       log.warn("Error closing CallableStatement", e);
+               }
+       }
+
+       public static void close(ResultSet rs) {
+               try {
+                       if (rs != null) rs.close();
+               } catch (SQLException e) {
+                       log.warn("Error closing ResultSet", e);
+               }
+       }
+
        public String getQuery() {
                return query;
        }

$ svn diff JDBCSamplerBeanInfo.java > JDBCSamplerBeanInfo.java.patch
$ cat JDBCSamplerBeanInfo.java.patch
Index: JDBCSamplerBeanInfo.java
===================================================================
--- JDBCSamplerBeanInfo.java    (revision 388876)
+++ JDBCSamplerBeanInfo.java    (working copy)
@@ -50,7 +50,7 @@
                p.setValue(NOT_UNDEFINED, Boolean.TRUE);
                p.setValue(DEFAULT, JDBCSampler.SELECT);
                p.setValue(NOT_OTHER,Boolean.TRUE);
-               p.setValue(TAGS,new String[]{JDBCSampler.SELECT,”Update Statement”});
+               p.setValue(TAGS,new String[]{JDBCSampler.SELECT,JDBCSampler.UPDATE,JDBCSampler.STATEMENT});

                p = property(”query”);
                p.setValue(NOT_UNDEFINED, Boolean.TRUE);

Update

Good to know somebody read my post, and responded positively. The quickest way for patches is to log a Bugzilla request. Seemed somebody already had, so it was easy for me to just to contribute to Bug #38682