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.
