"New Shimmer is both a floor wax and a dessert topping!" - Chevy Chase, Saturday Night Live

On a Saturday Night Live comedy skit, a husband is arguing that Shimmer is a dessert topping, while his wife insists that it’s a floor wax. Then the Shimmer spokesman-Chevy Chase-explains that it is both. While this juxtaposition is humorous, in many respects this is what databases have been doing for years. Instead of specializing on one specific task, most mainstream databases provide an acceptable combination of performance and capabilities across all use cases. The pluggable storage engine architecture is now changing this, ushering in an era of on-demand specialization.

MySQL allows you to select the storage engine not just for the application, but for each table used by the application. Let me use an analogy to describe how powerful this is. Consider an automobile that enables you to simply switch from one engine to another. You …

Some of you have noticed Kickfire, a new sponsor at this year’s MySQL Conference and Expo. Like Keith Murphy, I have been involved with them for a while now. This article explains the basics of how their technology is different from the current state of the art in complex queries on large amounts of data.

Kickfire is developing a MySQL appliance that combines a pluggable storage engine (for MySQL 5.1) with a new kind of chip. On the surface, the storage engine is not that revolutionary: it is a column-store engine with data compression and some other techniques to reduce disk I/O, which is kind of par for the course in data warehousing today. The chip is the really exciting part of the technology.

The simplest description of their chip is that it …