August 4, 2008

So, the Sun-MySQL boys, specifically their Director of Architecture Brian Aker, announced the new light-weight cloud store - Drizzle.

I like minimalist approaches to technology. And in a read-intensive infosphere, why have a fatter kernel than needed? Why give the devs more datatypes than fingers? Keep it simple and lean, it’s the essence of making distributed systems work. Not because it is the “better” in a subjective sense, but easier to debug when crap does the samba on your ceiling. Loving the UTF-8 and UTC enforcement. Nothing wrong with a little discipline.

Obviously, Drizzle is theoretically late to the game, with BigTable and SimpleDB having been around for a bit now. However, I am not entirely certain that their goal is to compete with those two as much as it is to offer MySQL customers a “club racer” version of their database. Neither am I certain that Drizzle is truly as simple as the other two cloud DBs, I reckon it won’t be a bridge too far for existing MySQL customers, assuming they are not Stored Procedure heavy.

My assumption would be that the new lean kernel architecture should deliver better performance & reliability assuming you don’t end up relying on many external interfaces. I would also think that the minute the solution you are working on begins to rely on too many features outside the micro-kernel, it’s time to consider the full MySQL stack. Hopefully, Aker’s team will do a solid job of differentiating Drizzle by establishing tangible benchmarks and clear functional boundaries.

The one thing I AM confused about is the name. A drizzle is a light shower? So I assume the name comes from the ‘lightness’ of the shower? And the shower is really from the cloud down to the ground below… but this DB would perform the processing IN the cloud… what goes over the wire would be XML or JSON or Binary…

I think this is an exciting move from Aker & Co. and shows that they are listening to their partners & market. I’ll consider using this for any of my start-ups or cloud solutions and keep a close eye on its progress! Goodluck!

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