Slashdot Mirror
Slimmed Down MySQL Offshoot Drizzle is Built For the Web
Incon writes "Builder AU reports that Brian Aker, MySQL's director of architecture, has unveiled Drizzle, a database project aimed at powering websites with massive concurrency as well as trimming superfluous functionality from MySQL. Drizzle will have a micro-kernel architecture with code being removed from the Drizzle core and moved through interfaces into modules. Aker has already selected particular functionality for removal: modes, views, triggers, prepared statements, stored procedures, query cache, data conversion inserts, access control lists and some data types."
One man's "superfluous" is another man's key feature. No views? No prepared statements? Holy carp. Isn't MySQL crippled enough as it is?
At first glance it's hard for me to see where Drizzle would fit where SQLite doesn't.
I always thought SQLite did a perfect job of filling in the space between the need for a full blown database and the weight it adds to the server setup. SQLite, as its name suggests, is very lightweight. Where exactly will Drizzle fit in?
Why would anyone in their right mind set up a Web/SQL platform using MS products?
You'd be surprised. Our web team recently got on an "I love MS!" kick for some reason. They'd been on Linux for years but a lot of the new/shinny buzzword stuff that they wished to install wanted Active Directory, IIS, and other non-sense. Because the Linux setup didn't lend itself well to installing all that proprietary stuff, and because they convinced themselves (somehow) that the most popular software is always the most insecure anyways (so Apache being the most popular webserver is the most insecure), they switched to Windows + IIS (+MySQL, but SQL Server is being pushed hard) to host the website.
Now I've even had pressure to convert my servers from Linux to Windows where possible to "standardize".
On a more on-topic note though, I'm not sure where this leaves MySQL itself. As a "real" database, it naturally can't compare to SQL Server or Oracle, but even competing in the free segment, PostgreSQL blows it away. Traditionally MySQL was just the toy database for non-critical stuff that you wanted speed out of (and little else). If Drizzle accomplishes that, then I don't see a real place for the mainline MySQL anymore. Drizzle if you want speed, PostgreSQL if you want features/stability, and Oracle if you gots money to spend.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Which is exactly what the majority of CMSs do today. They treat the DB as dumb storage, and make very little use of its capabilities.
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
The thing is, is that not everybody needs a full ACID compliant transactional database. All that stuff tends to slow down the whole database. It would be much nicer for many people to just have a simple non-transactional database. Think about how many web apps are out there that don't use transactions, and have not need for them. Many applications would benefit from increased speed over increased transactional capabilities.
On another note, what's with the lack of hosting services providing PostgreSQL? I would love to use it, at least for some projects, but the fact that it's not available on many hosts makes it quite a hard decision to make. I don't want to pick up another hosting provider, or switch over all my stuff just to use a different database.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Umm..errrr! Drizzle will have a micro-kernel architecture with code being removed from the Drizzle core and moved through interfaces into modules. Akers has already selected particular functionality for removal: modes, views, triggers, prepared statements, stored procedures, query cache, data conversion inserts, access control lists and some data types."
From my point of view, this is MySQL finally embracing their target market.
These features are great and important, but if you're doing small scale web programming through a framework that uses an ORM, or just very simple SQL, why not slim the program down?
If you want real database features, you probably shouldn't be using MySQL in the first place in my opinion.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
That was exactly my thought. Hooray, we just jumped 10 years backwards. Hopefully this time they've fixed the database corruption issues that had me truncating table files once a week.
Of course this just confirms my belief (and the reason I've never yet used MySQL in an environment where I was given the choice) that even when these guys added these features they either didn't understand them or didn't believe that they were ever important.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
While kind of hackish (it uses dia as its GUI), cool projects like tedia2sql make it easy to develop a single schema which works on 8 or 9 major RDMS, for free. It's even possible to generate customized triggers and/or schema sections on a per RDBMS basis.
I don't think it covers stored procedures. It has been a long time since I've used it, but regardless, considering stored procedures are often ignored, it may or may not be a factor for your next project.
Seeing how prepared statements are meant to make repeated queries faster, by allowing reuse of the plan, I'd say that this was a stupid thing to remove. Not as stupid as views, though, since those are basically just stored and named queries and as such trivial to implement/maintain.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Really tiring... really... Still C++... should require C compiler complexity only ... well, should go for GIT instead.
Bazare is
And GPL for what, since we have to surrender our GPL rights to a for-profit organisation(Sun upper management and board) and in no case I would like to have my code in their closed proprietary forks...
We need a Linux-spirit-like SQL DB engine for God Sake!
I used to do the same thing, reach for MySQL for web applications first simply because there are more hosting companies supporting MySQL for a large number of reasons. I reached for PostgreSQL for intranet or business application where clients could use the features, but maybe could not afford or wanted to spend the money on SQL Server or Oracle. But in the last couple years, I've noticed more hosting companies offering PG support as well. However this changed for me in the past six months when SUN purchased MySQL.
But SUN buying MySQL and then not really having any what I would call "firm plans" on what they were going to do with it was enough for me to look at PostgreSQL as the db of choice for the latest application I was hired to develop. At this point, PG development seems to be more of a known quantity.
I could be wrong and Sun might create something that is absolutely amazing and the best. thing. ever. But until then, I'll stick with what I know till something better comes along.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Modern web frameworks these days just use it as a over-glorified hash store anyway. The other features are useless in that context. However, I feel we'll see a move to document databases, such as CouchDB, by those frameworks in the near future leaving MySQL out of the game completely.
Yes; and in fact I haven't found another safe way to feed parameters to a database in Java. There doesn't appear to be any kind "sanitize/escape" function nor paremetrized input for non-prepared statements in the JAVA SQL API, so either you write one yourself or stick to PreparedStatements.
BTW: PostgreSQL supports such out-of-band delivery of parameters even for non-prepared statements.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I think what drives everybody crazy are the people using MySQL who act like they're database experts because of it.
Just because it does what most people want, doesn't mean it's a very good example of DBMS software.
Maybe not