Is the 'database for the cloud' ready? Drizzle GA released

What does Drizzle GA mean for MySQL?

The Drizzle project has been pumping out release after release for some time, but the March 13 release marks the first "generally available," release. Is it time to start migrating off MySQL yet?

Drizzle is a fork of MySQL 6.0, started in 2008. But Drizzle doesn't aim to be like MariaDB, with drop-in replacement of MySQL. Drizzle is very different from MySQL in many respects and meant for cloud infrastructure and Web applications. It's also significantly different from MySQL in that it's a true community project — not a project controlled by a single vendor.

Stewart Smith blogged about the GA and says that it means "we're pretty confident that people aren't going to en masse ask for our heads when they start using it."

But wait, there's more! Not only does Smith say that DBAs probably won't want the heads of the Drizzle team, but now Drizzle has a release that will be maintained:

Drizzle7 is something that can be packaged in Linux distros. It's no longer something where the best bet is to add the PPA and upgrade every two weeks or build from source yourself. If you’re looking to deploy Drizzle (or develop against it) — you can rely on this release.

However, he leaves it up to the individual or organization to decide if it's ready for production. "I’ll never use the words “production ready” to describe a release – it's never up to me. It's up to each person or organisation looking to deploy a piece of software to decide if that bit of software is production ready for them." And he goes on to encourage people to find bugs, "I'm sure there's new an interesting ways it can be broken by saying we’re ready for a much larger crowd to hammer on it."

If you're interested in trying it out, check the docs and give it a spin. According to this post there's still "a great deal of compatibility with MySQL" and existing MySQL connectors for PHP, Perl, and other languages should still connect to and query Drizzle.

I'm curious what effect, if any, Drizzle will have on MySQL. I doubt that the world is going to switch to Drizzle overnight, but Drizzle seems to be much more friendly to community contribution and business use than MySQL under Oracle. Not that MySQL was especially community friendly under Sun or MySQL AB. It's always been a "source open" project that publishes code but doesn't get a lot of participation from the larger community — certainly not in the way that PostgreSQL does.

Watch this space for more on Drizzle. I plan to put it through its paces soon by seeing if I can run my WordPress blog on Drizzle...

How about you? MySQL is used by a lot of folks for small and large projects. I'd be curious to hear from people deploying MySQL — whether it's just for a personal site or for production use in a mission critical context — and if Drizzle is being considered.

• Linux
• Drizzle
• Linux
• MySQL
• open source
• Oracle
• Sun