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Drizzle seeks to scale up MySQL


By Alex Handy
April 24, 2009 — 
Brian Aker is rebuilding MySQL in the image of the Apache Web Server. As the director of architecture at MySQL, he's been spending much of his time over the last year studying what it is that developers actually use in MySQL. To that end, he expects to deliver Drizzle, a complete fork of the MySQL codebase, sometime next year.

For now, Drizzle is developing smoothly in four-month windows. “The focus is the restructuring of the code and enabling others to write the features they actually need,” said Aker. That means tossing out most of the typical features, such as authentication and stored procedures, found in a modern database.

Aker said the inspiration for Drizzle came after the MySQL 5.0 release in late 2005, while he was presenting at user conferences. “At the very end of a MySQL 5.0 presentation, there were some different emotions going on in the room," he said.

"Half the room was into 5.0. They were the people who take the SQL and they embed it in the application. They needed a cheaper version of Oracle. The other half of the room said, 'We don't care about your new features, what we care about is, does it perform better? In fact, we want to disable the new features.' "

Thus Drizzle was born with a design from the ground up to emulate the Apache Web Server's plug-in system. That will allow the open-source community to add functionality while Aker and his team focus on speed and scalability.

“We've been working on a new protocol [that] is more centric to the Web environment," said Aker. "All databases today are built around client/server. We need to be able to build stateless and stateless-like protocols to communicate with databases. We'll use UDP [User Datagram Protocol] for fire-and-forget type stuff. And we'll change the protocol to stop things like SQL injection.

“We decided to focus on Web applications. Today, MySQL performs pretty poorly if you go over four cores. The MySQL market is just now entering 16 cores. We had to go back and say, 'How do we make it so in the future we can scale?' The world is 64-bit, and SSD will be common in two years. There's a lot of RAM. Why spend our time trying to make 32-bit work? We needed to make the database much more maintainable. The modular architecture design was a takeaway from Apache. We threw out the concept of one core monolithic codebase.”

One upside of Oracle’s planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems is that the Drizzle project will now be taking place within the same company as the InnoDB transaction engine for MySQL. Even before the acquisition, Aker said the Drizzle team “decided to make InnoDB the default engine for the core inside of Drizzle.”

Aker said that he hopes to have Drizzle ready for general availability next June. Until that time, the project is hosted on Launchpad (a collaboration portal and code-hosting platform), and is open for users to toy with right now.


Related Search Term(s): Drizzle, MySQL


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