node.dbslayer.js is a very basic and easy-to-use library to connect to a DBSlayer server, which effectively provides non-blocking and scalable MySQL support for Node.JS.

DBSlayer benefits include:

• It's Node.JS/V8/JavaScript friendly, since the the messages are delivered in JSON format over HTTP.

• Developed by the New York Times, it's designed with scalability in mind, doing connection pooling for you. This is what makes DBSlayer arguably better than implementing an async MySQL client directly into Node (through mysac for example).

• Node.js (tested with v0.1.21)
• DBSlayer (tested with beta-12)

From your node.js script, require the dbslayer package

var db = require('dbslayer');

Initialize a connection

var connection = db.Server('localhost', 9090);

and then perform a query:

connection.query("SELECT * FROM table");

To be truly non-blocking, Server::fetch has to return a promise and not the result immediately. This means that in order to be able to perform queries in a designated order or access the result, you'll have to use callbacks:

connection.query("SELECT * FROM TABLE").addCallback(function(result){
	for (var i = 0, l = result.ROWS.length; i < l; i++){
		var row = result.ROWS[i];
		// do something with the data
	}
});

If you want to capture MySQL errors, subscribe to the 'error' event

connection.query("SELECT * FROM inexistent_table").addErrback(function(error, errno){
	alert('mysql error! + ' error);
});

Aside from query, the commands stat, client_info, host_info, server_version and client_version are available, which provide the respective information about the server.

Compile it according to the instructions here.

Then create a /etc/dbslayer.conf file defining a database. Here I'm defining the cool server which connects to my mysql database

[cool]
database=mysql
host=localhost
user=root
pass=1234

Then run DBSlayer for that connection:

dbslayer -c /etc/dbslayer.conf -s cool

Test it by running test.js like this:

node test.js "SELECT * FROM help_category"

If you get a bunch of entries like in this screenshot then dbslayer (and node.dbslayer.js) work!

Guillermo Rauch <http://devthought.com>