There was once a big hooplah about the MySQL Storage Engine Architecture and how it was easy to just slot in some other method of storage instead of the provided ones. Over the years I’ve repeatedly mentioned how this wasn’t really …

What or who is Amira?Well... Many would know Amira is to David as My is to Monty.Amira also has all the same letters as Maria, except that it is in PDP "middle-endian" byte order.It is also the codename of a little known project while I was at MySQL: Soon after Oracle acquired Innobase OY, the powers that be at MySQL did not want to solely rely on InnoDB (or BerkeleyDB) as a transactional data

Brian mentioned Gemini on his blog... As many people remember, there was a stunned silence for a while when Oracle purchased InnoBase OY only 2 years ago... Very similar to the stunned silence about 6 years ago when the suits at NuSphere tried to do a SCO. Back on to the topic at hand... Gemini. About two years ago, Brian fed me a copy of the Gemini engine saying that "Hey, you remember Gemini? Here's the code. Get it working. Don't talk about it and call it 'Amira'.". Perhaps not exactly his words but close enough.

So the Amira project had a shaky beginning... I ported the code to work on MySQL 5.0 and started examining it, removing platform-specific code, and improving the performance of it. From the first working run to the last, I think performance improved by about a factor of 10 but I don't remember specifics. The Amira project was cancelled 2Q2006. I suppose …