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MySQL Falcon Storage Engine Open Sourced

Posted by kdawson on from the stooping-to-conquer dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The code for the Falcon Storage Engine for MySQL has been released as open source. Jim Starkey, known as the father of Interbase, is behind its creation; previously he was involved with the Firebird SQL database project. Falcon looks to be the long-awaited open source storage engine that may become the primary choice for MySQL, and along the way offer some innovation and performance improvements over current alternatives." This is an alpha release for Windows (32-bit) and Linux (32- and 64-bit) only, and is available only in a specially forked release of MySQL 5.1.

3 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. Re:MySQL versus PostgreSQL by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 4, Insightful
    is evidence that easier trumps better when it comes to the early adoption curve, something I wish the PGSQL folks had understood (or rather cared about).

    But in something as mission-critical as a database, of all things, reliability trumps everything. I don't think they could have developed PostgreSQL any other way and still supported its primary goal of safety.

    PGSQL should have thrashed MySQL long ago. If you wait long enough, competing projects will gain parity and the game is over.

    What gave you the (wrong) impression that PostgreSQL folks have been sitting around twiddling their thumbs? Version 8.2 just came out within the month and includes several performance boosts that make it fly on our production systems.

    --
    Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
  2. Re:Please explain by rongage · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is easy and one of the tenants of so-called dual licensing setups...

    Basically, if you don't want to pay to use the software, you are bound to the terms of the GPL. If you don't want to be bound to the terms of the GPL, you gotta pay.

    --
    Ron Gage - Westland, MI
  3. Re:New Microsoft Sql Server by Thundersnatch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Microsoft SQL Server has had almost all of these features since its first release in the early 90s. MVCC was just introduced in Microsoft SQL Server 2005. There is no row-level compression in SQL Server (or Oracle, or DB2, or PostGreSQL... which is probably a *good thing* from a performance perspective).

    This is a nice step forward for MySQL, but for the most part it is just a means for catching up to the other commercial DBs and PostgreSQL. ACID compliance, granular locking, MVCC, and multithreading are *not* differentiating features in the database world.