MySQL Split

MySQL's had an interesting path lately, which I'd missed most of, as I'm currently working in an Oracle shop. Google released their patches for the database system, and several other companies (eBay, for one) have written their own sets of patches to improve MySQL for their particular purposes. That wasn't much of a surprise; it's open source, it's stable, and large companies can benefit from tweaking projects to fit their needs.

What got me were two related (but outside) projects; OurDelta and Drizzle.

Drizzle is a branch of MySQL, stripped to bare bones and optimized for multi-core, multi-cpu modern systems. It's specifically aimed at cloud computing, and (by default) turns off all of the enterprise features; triggers, stored procedures, views, and several other things are in optional plugins, and not part of the standard install. It was branched by a group of folks at Sun, working on MySQL, who believe the current system core can't be easily developed to be modular, and who wanted to make a very, very alpha branch to work in that direction. It's still very immature software, but their aim is to make the next great database, and seems to have good odds of doing just that.

OurDelta is a website barely five weeks old, but already with a lot of interest generated. Various companies have created and open sourced their patches to MySQL; this site aims to aggregate them all. Their aim is to make the very best of the current database technology, and it looks like a really good start, with 20+ patches built into 5.0, currently working on ports to 5.1.

Dunno if it's interesting to you, but it's interesting to me to see two open source projects aiming to solve the same problem by opposite means, with both showing measurable success.