Drizzle

MySQL and the freedom to fork

Patrick Galbraith has initiated a fascinating discussion with his post, "What is the official branch of MySQL?" I did a double-take when I first saw it, and I can't quite shake the question from my mind. It implies much of the power, and peril, of open source.

The question is critical because it implies that open source can become much bigger than the developer--whether an individual or a company--that created it. While Linus Torvalds, for example, remains central to Linux kernel development, Linux has become much, much bigger than Torvalds. Companies and foundations have been set up … Read more

MySQL getting too big for its corporate britches?

For anyone interested in seeing just how different and game-changing open source can be, there's really no need to look beyond MySQL, the open-source database leader. Jeremy Zawodny, formerly of Yahoo, and now of Craigslist, takes a hard look at the changing face of MySQL, reaching some surprising conclusions about MySQL in the process:

Nowadays MySQL has a much slower release cycle than it used to. It's still available in "commercial" and free ("community") releases. There's still a company behind it--a much larger one in fact. But one that also has a vested … Read more

All MySQL's children

As American soap operas go, All My Children has been one of the best and most popular since it first aired in 1970. The ABC soap, which aimed to be highly topical, has long tackled difficult social issues like abortion and homosexuality when most other shows held back.

MySQL, the premier open-source database, has decided to steal the script from All My Children, addressing some of the most challenging issues in open-source software, like commercial extensions and now, in lurid detail, the fork with Drizzle, as well as an alternative patch community, OurDelta.

First, the Drizzle fork. Announced last year (likely through gritted MySQL teeth, though a brave face was put on it), Drizzle has quickly gained a following, with Stephen O'Grady recently celebrating its development:

...(T)hose who would dismiss Drizzle as merely a stripped down MySQL miss the point entirely; the project is, if anything, a fundamental rethinking of what a database should be and the deployment context for it. Drizzle is emphatically more than a refactoring. It is, rather, a database being built expressly for scale out clouds running Map/Reduce like architectures at immense scale.

This may well be true, but it could prove a bit of a set-back (if short-term) to MySQL, or rather to Sun Microsystems, and arguably makes the company's job harder to monetize MySQL, which, in turn, means that fewer development resources will likely make their way into MySQL and Drizzle.

O'Grady points out that Sun supports Drizzle with funding and so it must see a commercial opportunity in it. Let's hope so because "community" is not going to turn Drizzle into an enterprise grade product. Self-interested corporations will do that, as Puppet's Luke Kanies recently wrote.

Former MySQLer Arjen Lentz's OurDelta, on the other hand, seems to me to offer similar promise without being a fork of MySQL. Rather than replace MySQL, OurDelta "produces enhanced builds for MySQL, with OurDelta and third-party patches, for common production platforms." As Lentz told me over IM:

Drizzle is going where Brian (Aker) & Co. reckon the future will lie. It's an experiment and exploration, as Brian has written/talked about.

OurDelta deals with the needs of the MySQL production users today.… Read more

MySQL forks itself with Drizzle

In most companies, there are prohibitions against creating competitive, derivative works of the company's intellectual property. At MySQL (now Sun), well, things may be a little different.

As announced at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Brian Aker, MySQL's director of architecture, has launched Drizzle, an optimized and trimmed-down version of the popular open-source MySQL database.

In other words, MySQL has forked itself. "The right to fork" is, of course, a cardinal right of open source.

But forking is usually driven by rival factions on a project (e.g., the Adempiere developers forking Compiere). In MySQL'… Read more