"What if"

Have you ever wanted to know what would happen if you had taken a different direction?

A number of months ago I was on the phone with the Rackspace CTO talking about Memcached and Gearman, and the work I am doing there. He had asked me if I had ever thought about creating a slimmed down version of MySQL to work with them.

The answer?

Of course!

This is something I get asked with some regularity. People will want MySQL done in some fashion other then what it does by default (aka what serves most of the user base). Taking the code and cutting out the one thing the requester dislikes is a pretty boring task. I keep a notebook of these requests. I consider it valuable feedback, not as single items, but as a whole.

After I got off the phone the idea stuck in the back of my mind. The next day I woke up and started playing with the idea of seeing what a …