OStatic

Have you heard of Drizzle? As detailed here, it's a lightweight, open source SQL database for the cloud and the web, being designed for massive concurrency on multi-CPU/core architecture. If that sounds a lot like MySQL, it should. Drizzle's code is derived from MySQL--basically a fork of the MySQL 6.0 source code. However, it's stripped down in several ways deliberately, or refactored, for solutions to some of the problems that MySQL runs into. Brian Aker, who is an engineer at Sun, and behind the project, has a post up about it. He cites speed, simplicity and less overhead as benefits of Drizzle over MySQL. The project is on Launchpad here for developers, although you can't downlaod and use it yet. Here's more backstory.

For many developers focused on applications that reside on the web, including open source developers working on database-centric and software-as-a-service sites, the issue of scaling applications is increasingly important. You can find a couple of recent columns we did on cloud computing solutions for scaling applications here. Today, a post on scalability over at James Hamilton's blog caught my eye. He starts out with a discussion of how the database architecture underlying Flickr is constructed, but what's really striking is his? collection of posts from around the web on how sites ranging from Craigslist to Technorati to Second Life approach scalability.