Drizzle - a new direction for databases

Posted by Ian Roughley on Aug 12, 2008

Sections

Architecture & Design,

Operations & Infrastructure

Topics

Architecture ,

Database Design

Tags

Database ,

MySQL

Unveiled at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) by Brian Aker (MySQL Director of Architecture), Drizzle can be described as a "what if" project for creating a database specifically tuned for a particular subset of applications.

Brian outlines this best in his blog:

The goal right now is to target a certain class of applications/developers and see if this is useful. As an example:

1. Web based apps.
2. Cloud components.
3. Databases without business logic (aka stored procedures).
4. Multi-Core architecture.

What are the bigger differences in philosophies?

Adopt external libraries, use open source mechanics for contributions, keep to an open style of communication, and remove the line between internal and external development. Essentially do what I have been referring to as "Organic Open Source". We have focused on C99, POSIX and autotools based systems. We have taken to a very micro-kernel design where code is being removed from the center and pushed out to the edges via interfaces. We are taking a Linux/Apache tightly coupled design for modules.

More formally, Drizzles features are:

• Based on MySQL 6.0 source tree
• No shipped libraries
• POSIX compliance
• Micro kernel design
• Pluggable Architecture for views, stored procedures, UDFs, storage engines ...
• Sharding across multiple nodes
• Intelligent proxy
• Multi CPU/Multi Core
• Optimized field types
• Efficient memory useage
• No internal ACL, use LDAP/PAM
• No database data formatting
• Cleaned up make system
• InnoDB default storage engine
• Windows compatibility removed

Currently Drizzle is in alpha (with major new changes being introduced daily), with no stable release or binary release.  For more information, or to download and experiment, visit the Drizzle website.

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   drizzly drizzly....

   by Zubin Wadia

   Some more thoughts on Drizzle here:
   
   zwadia.com/?p=26
   
   
   
   Cheers,
   
   
   
   Zubin Wadia
   
   
   CTO
   
   
   www.imagework.com
   
   
   "Business Acceleration through Process Automation."

   Reply

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