MySQL, "what if", and the drizzle project

Looks like drizzle is announced now. I've spent a bit of time after work and on lunch breaks helping out here and there, and I'm excited about working on a database project again. Why am I working on the project? Average time from when I write a patch to when it goes into the tree has been measured in minutes, not in hours/days/weeks/months. Yes, I'm running the test suite first. Yes, I'm getting another person to review the code first. This is an example of how adding people to a project can slow it down, and how getting out of the way of the engineers can have amazing results. We set up bug tracker, code hosting, team organization, package build system, mailing list, IRC channel, and more in a matter of minutes, and it has been amazing to see how fast the code is coming in from all over the world. There was truly a pent-up demand for somewhere to be able to freely work on ideas.

If you haven't read Ian's paper about the community-agile process, you should. You can see many of the ideas there in how the drizzle project is run. There is lots of work to do, and I think it's going to be great fun to see how far we can push drizzle. And the code is safely in a FLOSS distributed version control system that I have mirrors of, so nobody can put the code behind a corporate firewall and seal it off - it's alive and growing and unstoppable. If anyone wants to mirror the code, that is fine and I'll help you do it.

Sometimes people look at databases as boring, as a solved problem. I'm here to tell you that building interesting applications that have any kind of persistent state is not a solved problem, there are a lot more fantastic ideas to try, and some ideas that have only recently become practical. Check out the code and put up a branch with some ideas of your own!

We don't have packages for ubuntu yet, but we will be putting up a PPA soon. As you can imagine, there is still a fair amount of work involved in finishing the renaming and making packages that don't conflict with existing mysql installs.