About Drizzle

Today I'd like to put a light on pretty new project in the field of relational databases. It's called Drizzle and its objective is to compete and even beat MySQL. Drizzle started as a fork of MySQL 6.0 by Brian Aker. The vision was to make a lightweight database system that will suit needs of modern web applications and to trim off all unnecessary features stuffed in MySQL making it slower and biger.


Nowadays, Drizzle is fresh living community-driven database developed with clouds, or generally with high concurrency enabled environments, in mind. The main features are:

• Microkernel architecture
• Modularity (modules responsible for additional functionality)
• MySQL communication protocol (New Drizzle protocol is under development)
• InnoDB as a standard storage engine (But you can use Drizzle also with non-transactional storage engine like BlitzDB which is new general purpose storage engine being developed along with Drizzle)
• Written in C++ and being pretty small in comparison with MySQL
• Small and fast
• Some (spare) functionality is missing

The fact, that Drizzle is being developed to be cloud-computing ready is represented by tight partnership between the Drizzle project and the Rackspace company. Rackspace is one of the main sponsors of Drizzle and pays few developers for full-time job on the Drizzle code.


I think that Drizzle could be good option when you don't want to give up on traditional relation database paradigm and not to mess up with whatever_it_is NoSQL stuff. If you want small and fast database with good ability to scale in the distributed environment, you should try Drizzle.


Do you have any experience with Drizzle or would you suggest some other DB system?