I decided to take a look at Drizzle today and was encouraged by what I saw. Here’s my favorite part:

There is no UNSIGNED (as per the standard). * There are no spatial data types GEOMETRY, POINT, LINESTRING & POLYGON (go use Postgres). * No YEAR field type. * There are no FULLTEXT indexes for the MyISAM storage engine (the only engine FULLTEXT was supported in). Look at either Lucene, Sphinx, or Solr. * No “dual” table. * The “LOCAL” keyword in “LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE” is not supported

GO USE POSTGRES. Awesome.

List of differences from MySQL.

So yesterday I introduced the newly committed HTTP JSON key-value interface in Drizzle. The next step of course is to create some simple application that would use this to store data, this serves both as an example use case as well as for myself to get the feeling for whether this makes sense as a programming paradigm.

Personally, I have been a fan of the schemaless key-value approach ever since I graduated university and started doing projects with dozens of tables and hundreds of columns in total. Especially in small projects I always found the array structures in languages like PHP and Perl and Python to be very flexible to develop with. As I was developing and realized I need a new variable or new data field somewhere, it was straightforward to just toss a new key-value into the array and continue with writing code. No need …

Oh boy, I'm starting to feel the stress of having to prepare a little bit of this and a little bit of that for the upcoming MySQL User Conference (Santa Clara, April 10 to 13). But I wanted to also jump on this meme and list a few sessions I definitively want to attend:

I'm speaking, so I suppose I need to attend:

• How to evaluate which MySQL High Availability solution best suits you. This 3 hour tutorial I'm co-presenting with Ben Mildren, a former Nokia collague who now works with Pythian.

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Now that the snow is melting and spring is in the air, the SkySQL Team is hitting the road and making the rounds of key industry events, trade shows, and meetups around the globe.  Come meet the team, pick-up a few tips and tricks for using the MySQL database, network with your peers, and learn more about SkySQL’s products and services.  Here are some the events we’ll be at this spring:

BIG Data, A New Horizon for Data Analysis
March 20 - 21, 2012
Cité Internationale Univeritaire de Paris, Paris, France

POSSCON 2012
March 28-29, 2012
Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center, Columbia, South Carolina

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Earlier today I posted a Drizzle white paper we've been working on: Drizzle and IPv6.

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A week ago I again had the pleasure to give a guest lecture at Tampere University of Technology. I've visited them the first time when I worked as MySQL pre-sales in Sun.

To be trendy, I of course had to talk about the cloud. It turns out every section has the subtitle "...and why it is more difficult for databases". I also rightfully claim to have invented the NoSQL key-value development model in 2005.

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Today I'm coming out of the closet. Since I'm a professional database expert I try to be like the mainstream and use the commercial MySQL forks (including MySQL itself). But I think those close to me have already known for some time that I like community based open source projects. I cannot deny it any longer, so let me just say it: I'm a Drizzle contributor and I'm very much engaged!

I've been eyeing the Drizzle project since it started in 2008. Already then there were dozens of MySQL hackers for which this project was a refuge they instantly flocked to. Finally a real open source project based on MySQL code that they could contribute to, and they did. It was like a breath of fresh air in a culture that previously had only accepted one kind of relationships: that between an employer and an employee. Drizzle was more liberal. It accepted also forms of engagement already common in most other open source projects that are based on …

Good news to all of you who are going or were thinking of going to the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo. Yesterday two great addon events were announced, both happening on Friday April 13th, right after the main conference:

Drizzle Day 2012

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Henrik has already posted it over on the Drizzle Blog, but I thought I’d give a shout out here too.

We’re holding a Drizzle Day right after the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo in April. So, since you’re all like me and don’t book your travel this far in advance, it’ll be easy to stay for the extra day and come and learn awesome things about Drizzle.

I’m also pretty glad that my employer, Percona is sponsoring the event.

Usually people do this around New Year, I will do it in February. Actually, I was inspired to do this after reviewing all the talks for this year's MySQL Conference - what a snapshot into the state of where we are! It made me realize we've made important progress in the past year, worth taking a moment to celebrate it. So here we go...

Diversification

In the past few years there was a lot of fear and doubt about MySQL due to Oracle taking over the ownership. But if you ask me, I was more worried for MySQL because of MySQL itself. I've often said that if MySQL had been a healthy open source project - like the other 3 components in the LAMP stack - then most of the NoSQL technologies we've seen come about would never have been started as their own projects, because it would have been more natural to build those needs on …