The latest from the MySQL community

Brian Aker's Drizzle post was the most interesting news to emerge during OSCON 2008. In case you have been on vacation, Drizzle is a stripped down version of MySQL for horizontally scaled web applications and Cloud Computing. Full-blown SQL databases are often overkill here, a point of view espoused by this blog among others.

It's easy to get excited about Drizzle. Brian, Monty, and others define the problem space very clearly and list some intriguing feature ideas on the Drizzle wiki. Just one example: sharding across multiple nodes, which is key to scaling massive reads and writes. From a technical perspective, it sounds cool.

Still, there's a dark side for …

Will Drizzle (Brian, Monty, Mark, MontyT, and others ...) become a cloudburst? I think so, and here is why...

First a simple question: what made diverse systems such as PHP, the HTTP protocol and memcached so popular?

Answer: ease of use, simplicity, speed and scalability.

And what made the original version of MySQL so popular? Well, exactly the same things.

Drizzle goes back to the roots, concentrating on what made the use of MySQL so widespread in the …

GigaOm’s Structure Conference took center stage today and lots of interesting stories are coming down the pipeline. Here are today’s top picks:

One of the best discussions at Tuesday's CloudCamp San Francisco was "SQL or SimpleDB - Who will win?" Cloud computing is part of a fundamental shift in computer operations propelled by virtualization of hosts and disk storage. We were already starting to argue about SimpleDB as the camp started when the person sitting next me astutely jumped up and proposed it as a topic for discussion.

The argument against SQL goes something like this. Many applications handle very simple objects using only primary key look-ups. Hashtable-based datastores like SimpleDB and BigTable handle that model and also partition data automatically. This simpler data model maps better to object models in scripting languages, many of which …

Thanks to Tony Lawrence for inspiring today’s post. Hopefully these links don’t stink. 

Anthony Lawrence: Reasons I Don’t Like Social Media

Tools that once were valuable for pointing out the best of the web often become obsolete or spammy (you might say this about Digg). Tony’s example is StumbleUpon, a link sharing site that I love.  He contends that the social networking site has become clogged with junk or at least doesn’t provide consistent "quality" links. [Updated: Actually check the post comments for …