The latest from the MySQL community

When Sun acquired MySQL and announced that it would invest the resources necessary to position the open source database for mission-critical deployments, I think everyone assumed that the database would eventually become bigger and heavier.

Few would have predicted that we would also see a project that would make the database smaller and lighter, but that is exactly what Drizzle, a new project from Sun’s MySQL director of architecture Brian Aker, is all about.

Drizzle is taking a back-to-the-drawing-board approach to refactoring MySQL by ripping out much of the additional enterprise functionality that has gone into it since version 4.1 and focusing on the demands of a core set of applications.

As Brian …

In most companies, there are prohibitions against creating competitive, derivative works of the company's intellectual property. At MySQL (now Sun), well, things may be a little different.

As announced at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Brian Aker, MySQL's director of architecture, has launched Drizzle, an optimized and trimmed-down version ...

Have you heard of Drizzle? It was announced at OSCON yesterday and is all over the blogosphere. From the Drizzle FAQ:

* So what are the differences between is and MySQL?

No modes, views, triggers, prepared statements, stored procedures, query cache, data conversion inserts, ACL. Fewer data types. Less engines, less code. Assume the primary engine is transactional.

Also from the FAQ is that, right now at least, there is no intention to make this run natively on windows and they make the point:

* "This is not a SQL compliant relational..."

Very true, and we do not aim to be that.

It is a fork of MySQL that takes it backward to pre-5.0 in features but hopefully greatly reduces the bugs and instabilities. I plan to look at it but I don't see …

There are some good high level discussions on the various database architectures for implementing software as a service.  I’m on going to duplicate that.  Instead, this article is going to highlight some of the issues and tradeoffs when multiple tenants (customers of the software service provider) are put into one database.   The core of the problem is having multiple tenants in one set of database tables can make queries that select data for only one customer much slower. 

First, I’m testing on a new system, one with 32 gig of memory.  Currently,  the innodb_buffer_pool_size set to 28 gig.   I’m using the same size tables as previously, both Sale and SaleTenant have 120 million rows and are about 27 and 28 gig respectively.  This means that the tables fit into memory, so the following tests do not have an IO component.  Not perfect, but it shouldn't make a difference in the …

(Credit: O'Reilly Media, Bernard Golden, and Sourceforge.net)

According to new research released today by Bernard Golden (Navica) and O'Reilly Research, there are at least six reasons compelling the rapid rise of open source. Agility and scale, reduced vendor lock-in, quality and security, cost, sovereignty (i.e., Local, not necessarily US-based development), and innovation. No wonder Sourceforge downloads continue to rise.

In one particular area, however, open source shines, in my opinion: The ability to reduce lock-in to a particular vendor. The report suggests:

There is little potential price competition for incumbent vendors: Because locked-in vendors have little fear of being replaced, they are in a position to extract expensive maintenance and upgrade fees, bleeding ever-shrinking IT budgets of precious dollars. For example, …

EnterpriseDB has announced the results (PDF) of its recent survey of open source database usage.

While the company understandably highlights the adoption of PostgreSQL for transaction-intensive applications and its high reliability and performance and scalability EnterpriseDB has done a pretty good job of presenting the results in an unbiased manner.

I couldn’t help feeling that some of the more interesting results are hidden at the end of or buried within EnterpriseDB’s write-up, or even missing entirely, however.

For example, right at the end of its report EnterpriseDB states that “eight three percent have yet to pay for the use of their open source database” which speaks volumes about both the challenge that open …

All of this talk of Drizzle (a fork of the MySQL server by Brian and Monty) has reminded me of a topic I have wanted to discuss for quite some time…

One of the things that sets MySQL apart (in, IMHO, a very bad way) from other Open Source database projects/products such as PostgreSQL (license) and Firebird (license) is that the MySQL documentation is NOT Open Source. The MySQL documentation is …

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 …

Simon Phipps hopes to change the way Sun deals with intellectual property rights. READ MORE

Today Brian launched Drizzle, something he's been working on for a number of weeks now, together with some other Sun/MySQL people and quite a few active MySQL community members. I scribbled some quick info and my own perspective on About Drizzle, with links to the various currently available resources.

I think it's an interesting and worthwhile development, and I understand it has the okidoki from inside Sun; Monty also noted this. We'll have to see how that goes though. It amounts to an internal fork, doesn't it... Drizzle is not directly a MySQL replacement, but it does kinda wipe the floor with MySQL's current development process, roadmap, licensing and business model. I do commend Sun on allowing a …