Back in 2008, I was at the OSCON conference when Brian Aker announced Drizzle to the world.
Nearly three years later, Drizzle is now Generally Available (GA), as a new open source database that takes a different path than its MySQL roots. Drizzle originally had the backing of Sun, but I don’t think that Oracle ever really cared for it.
Drizzle is a more scalable database in some ways than MySQL and is more suited for the cloud. It’s also compatible with MySQL, so it won’t be a major code rewrite for apps and enterprise that choose to use it.
While Drizzle is built for scale, it’s not just about big sites like Google and Facebook.
“I’ve seen someone say that Drizzle is designed for Google and Facebook. This is not the case at all,” Aker blogged. “We built it so that the next Facebook, Google, etc would have a platform to build on. Facebook and Google have their own forks of MySQL, they aren’t going to be using Drizzle. The pieces are there for the next company who needs to innovate, it is just a matter of someone making use of them.”
Though Drizzle leverages a NoSQL type of solution, Aker noted that Drizzle first and foremost is a relational database.