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MySQL Falcon Storage Engine Open Sourced
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.
I'm a developer, but I've never used MySQL.
Isn't MySQL already open source? If so, how does the Falcon storage engine differ from the "regular" storage engine that comes with MySQL?
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
So if Falcon uses MVCC, does it require something like PostgreSQL's VACUUM? Or does it have some other way to detect and remove dead tuples?
Also, has anyone looked at making PostgreSQL a storage plugin for MySQL? :-)
Nah, I'm just giving you a hard time. I've worked with a couple of people who have only ever worked on MySQL, and they tend to not know some pretty essential things for a DBA like ACID compliance and such.
It's just a function of how easy MySQL is to set up. It's trivial to set up, but a lot of the default decisions are generally bad for an SQL database, and the documentation -- while good -- never encourages you to go beyond the defaults.
It's like hearing someone say they can design websites, and then finding out they mean with FrontPage.
Drupal is one example of something that works great with MySQL. I can argue about MySQL's faults over and over, but at the end of the day it's easy to use and it's good enough for most people. CMS systems and forums are where MySQL really shines.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
As a I see Falcon is mainly an attempt to:
1) Get better performance on multiprocessor systems
2) Get a decent storage engine that is not controlled by MySQL competitors
As far as I can tell there is nothing in it that you can't get in Postgresql.
Postgresql already performs better than the standard MySQL on multiprocessor systems.
It remains to be seen if Falcon will be better than Postgresql once its production
ready. Well, there is one thing, Falcon compresses data while Postgresql doesn't. can't help wondering what this will do to performance.
On the other hand there seam to be a lot missing from Falcon that you find in Postgresql.
If you read the Falcon limits page on the mysql site you find that it lacks e.g:
- SELECT FOR UPDATE
- No online backup
- No foreign keys
All in all, I would say Postgresql would be a better choice, if your web hosting company allows you to use it.
MySQL have a tendency to slow down on many concurrent or complex queries. Postgresql is far better at handling triggers and can be programmed in many different programming languages. Support for domains and much more. MySQL also lacks EXCEPT, this makes some types of queries (relational division) much more complex than they have to be.
Still for people that aren't free to choose their database, it is nice to see that MySQL
makes some progress. Besides a little competition never hurts.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER