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

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.

[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

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.