Brain Acker, director of architecture for MySQL has opened the door to Drizzle, a light-weight, high-concurrency database server based on MySQL, targeted at web applications.

The architectural ideas as described in the FAQ:

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.

The FAQ goes on explain the differences between Drizzle and MySQL which include:

No modes, views, triggers, prepared statements, stored procedures, query cache, data conversion inserts, ACL. Fewer data types.  Less engines, less code. Assume the primary engine is transactional.

Michael Widenius, founder and original MySQL developer, explains more about Drizzle in this blog post, including the most interesting piece (to me) - that Drizzle will always contain the most up-to-date InnoDB code, meaning you don’t need to wait around for MySQL 6 or download the plugins from Oracle each year to get the latest and greatest.

While Drizzle is still in development you can check out the code and try it out. Or maybe even get involved and help out. More information on how to do both is available on the wiki.

Found this article while digging this evening.

It seems that topping this ‘Top 10′ list for large databases is The World Data Center for Climate (WDCC), operated by the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and the German Climate Computing Center.

The WDCC has 220 terabytes of web-accessible data, plus another 6 petabytes of additional data. (Three times the total information in all the US academic research libraries combined.) I would hate to see how that ran on anything slower than their 35 million euro supercomputer!

I should also mention that in the comments section several even larger databases are mentioned in the traditional, post-top-10-anything-countdown, hey-what-about-so-and-so fest.

I found a very clear, well-written introductory example to database normalization on devshed. Although it is in the MySQL portion of the site, it applies equally well across the board to other RDBMSs.

To get more details on normalization, the normal forms, and general good database development in general, check out Database Design for Mere Mortals: A Hands-On Guide to Relational Database Design, Second Edition by Michael J. Hernandez. Without a doubt the most useful db development book I’ve ever laid my hands on.

This article about PostgreSQL answers the five most common excuses people give for not trying PostgreSQL, or for sticking with their proprietary RDBMS (such as Oracle or SQL Server).