MySQL fork Drizzle gets general release

Drizzle has gone into general availability, giving developers access to its open-source derivative of MySQL 6.0 that is a self-styled "database for the cloud".

The Drizzle7 general availability (GA) release, made available on Tuesday, can migrate data from MySQL and function as a replacement for the Oracle software. The database management system microkernel is specifically for large cloud and web applications and is designed to favour implementation on large, parallelised systems of multicore processing architectures.

Drizzle is modern, modular, rather solid and understandable.

– Stewart Smith, Drizzle

"Overall, I think we've managed to take the now-defunct MySQL 6.0 tree (way back in 2008) and release something that can truly live up to the line 'database for cloud'," Drizzle programmer Stewart Smith wrote on his blog on Tuesday. "Drizzle is modern, modular, rather solid and understandable."

Drizzle forked from MySQL 6.0 three years ago and has been in constant development since then. The Drizzle project community includes people involved in Sun's development of the database platform, such as Brian Aker, MySQL's director of architecture.

MySQL similarities

The latest edition of MySQL, version 5.5, was released by Oracle in September. The update came with tweaks to run well on multicore hardware and with wide platform support, including Linux/Unix, Mac OS X, Windows and Solaris.

Drizzle "is in some ways similar to MySQL, and in other ways, unrecognisable", according to the Drizzle project. Specifically, it does not support Windows as a platform, it lacks an embedded server and favours large, concurrent environments over small ones.

"If we have the choice of improving performance for 1,024 simultaneous connections to the detriment of performance with only 64 connections, we will take that choice," reads the Drizzle documentation.

Drizzle7 is compatible with Sparc, Solaris x86, Mac OS X and Linux. Ubuntu 11.04, also known as Natty Narwhal, will have Drizzle .deb files in its Ubuntu repositories when it is released in April. In addition, there is a PPA [Personal Package Archive] available that allows developers to plug Drizzle7 into the 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) and 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) versions of Ubuntu.

Drizzle7's database management system microkernel is based on C++. Its functionality is provided from specific plug-ins, built on what its developers describe as a "completely new plug-in architecture", which yields a lean kernel that is expandable.

The Drizzle7 2011.03.13 GA tarball package is available online.