Drizzle's Future Moving To Rackspace?

abartels writes "It seems like there's been nothing but bad news and resignations coming from Oracle since it finally managed to close the deal on Sun. Finally, there's good news in that Drizzle seems to have a bright future ahead. It just isn't with Oracle, but with the Rackspace Cloud."

Comments

Re:Who is the Drizzle?

[Pojut]

Shake: Drizzle here.
Meatwad: Hello, yes Drizzle. Violent criminals have put...Fat Albert, what, what it's...
Frylock: No, no, it's Prince Albert.
Meatwad: Oh, have put...Fat Albert in a can, in your can.
Shake: I'll need precise coordinates, ma'am.
Meatwad: Oh okay, it's...it's in your butt, boy! It's in your butt! Did you hear me? It's in your butt!

Re:Better Headline

[geekoid]

off topic? it is specific to this article.

Apparently the mods are very white today.

It's still basically MySQL.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, the Drizzle crew has made some minor changes, but Drizzle is essentially still MySQL. That means it still has many of MySQL's many, many flaws and thousands of unfixed bugs.

Their work is interesting and innovative, but they should have built it off of PostgreSQL or even SQLite, rather than MySQL. I'm well aware of the developer connections with MySQL, but that's no reason to continue using what should be a dead project due to its lack of quality.

Re:It's still basically MySQL.

[mmsimanga]

but that's no reason to continue using what should be a dead project due to its lack of quality.

Maybe the user base of millions upon millions of web sites is enough motivation to continue developing developing the "low quality" project.

Re:It's still basically MySQL.

[krow]

Hi!

Drizzle is transactional by default.

Bad data? We don't insert it, we toss an error (and if we don't in some cases, it is a bug).

We purposely went after the issues in the MySQL gotchas list when we began (http://sql-info.de/mysql/).

Our DDL? Soon will be transactional. Our data dictionary is federated out to engines, so unlike MySQL in our system the engine owns the definition so you can't end up in a situation where the engine is off from the definition.

I wouldn't make the assumption that because we have a similar ancestor that we are the same at all. It would be like assuming Postgres and Ingres are the same (which they are most certainly not).

When I first started doing the rewrite I considered Postgres (and spoke to a number of the developers of it at the time). In the first year I went back and forth in my head on that decision. There would have been a lot of things that would have made PG a better starting point. By the time we reached 5.1 the MySQL codebase was junk. Postgres would have made for a good decision but there were three drawbacks.

1) Postgres is C and not C++. I find that I can write code in C++ nowadays much faster then I can in C (and it comes out just as fast, the C++ "is slow" is an archaic view).

2) Postgres is not designed to use threads. I prefer to work with threads over processes (and there is a lot of good and bad with both concepts).

3) Sun wouldn't have paid for it ;)

I wouldn't consider SQLite. It is neither type safe, not concurrent. It is a great database, but it doesn't solve any of my needs. I did think about Firebird for a bit, but while I know the MySQL and Postgres codebase, I don't know the Firebird code at all.

Cheers,
      -Brian

Re:It's still basically MySQL.

[TheSunborn]

I am pretty sure that PostgreSQL uses thread from version 8.0. Was that not one of the changes they made to improve the quality of their windows implementation?

But more interesting: Have Drizzle fixed the problem with views and the query optimizer. Each time I try to use views in mysql, i end up with such slow queries(Something like 100 times slower) that i have to replace the view with the query that created the view. The problem seems to be that if I select from a view and then also filter the result from an other value (Something like select * from MyView where MyFieldInTheVIewWithAnIndex=42) then mysql will always use the index used to create the view, instead of the index on the field MyFieldInTheViewWithAnIndex.

Re:It's still basically MySQL.

[PCM2]

Sure, but as a practical matter, until that $7/month hosting provider offers PostgreSQL as an option instead of MySQL, and then Wordpress will install with a couple clicks and set up its own tables on PostgreSQL... until that happens, Joe Sixpack who just wants to host his own blog isn't going to be interested in PostgreSQL. And if Joe Sixpack isn't interested, and he's the customer, why should a hosting provider push him toward PostgreSQL?

Furthermore, is Wordpress so terrible, running as it does on countless sites, that we must save it from MySQL? As another AC poster said, "Blogs with cached content that make a DB query every 10 minutes aren't a real test of quality." OK fine, but that argument sounds pretty much like saying, "MySQL does absolutely everything a trivial Wordpress site needs to do, and flawlessly, and MySQL is available for free everywhere, therefore we must pull out all the MySQL code from Wordpress and replace it with PostgreSQL." It doesn't hold water.

A programmer who tries to use MySQL for things it isn't suited for is going to end up feeling dumb. A non-techy customer who tries to use MySQL for things it's very well-suited for will end up feeling like he's master of his own destiny. Let's not confuse the two.

did it ever have a future with Oracle?

[moderatorrater]

My understanding was that Drizzle was created partly to get it out from under Sun and other corporations. Seems like saying it doesn't have a future with Oracle is like saying that postgres doesn't have a future with Oracle.

It will be too bad if Drizzle's the only place where exciting development takes place on the MySQL base. Say what you will about MySQL, there are a lot of shops that rely on it and would love to see it come closer to parity with other database programs.

PostreSQL

[aztracker1]

Queue the mass migration... Then again there's Firebird, or all the document (Couch, Mongo, Divan) and object NoSQL databases too.

Moving from a user to a major contributor of FOSS

[rjamestaylor]

Since the mid 90's I've been a user of FOSS projects and products for business use - contributing where and when I can - and I've been a long time customer of Rackspace since 2001 and an employee since Jan 2007... I must say I'm thrilled by the moves my company has been making to not only be a major consumer of Open Source products but also now a major contributor to such projects. From open Cloud architecture APIs and API specifications (enabling anyone to build their own Cloud hosting systems) to big-data focused projects like Cassandra and, of course, Drizzle.

Sorry to gush here...it's just that so many companies tend to nominally use Open Source to gain market share and free development help initially and then begin to restrict documentation, support and even access to new features in a dual licensing scheme. The list of names of those that "SCO-ify" their Open Source strategy is too long and sad to mention. So, please cut me some slack as I revel in the direction we're heading at Rackspace -- I hope more companies will jump on this trend to raise the sea level for us all.

To the Drizzle team: welcome! Very happy to have you onboard and look forward to your continued contributions to the community.

Note: my comments and gushing are my own!

Drizzle = what devs felt MySQL should have been

[dfdashh]

Background reading: one of the Drizzle guys who is moving over to Rackspace has a pretty good blog post on the move.

Although Drizzle is a really stripped down version of MySQL at the moment, it seems like the developers are trying to make it into what they thought MySQL should have been in the first place: a simple, modular database for web applications. From their FAQ:

What is the goal?
A micro-kernel that we then extend to add what we need. All additions come through interfaces that can be compiled/loaded in as needed. The target for the project is web infrastructure backend and cloud components.

Rackspace sounds like a perfect environment for them to fine tune their project under real world loads. Good on 'em.