Drizzle, an open source database project, grew out of Sun’s MySQL offering. Now that Sun has been folded into Oracle, smaller rivals are looking to tap into the Drizzle effort.
One of those is Rackspace, which has hired much of Drizzle’s core developer team to enhance its own cloud offerings. Server Watch has the details.
As Oracle continues to shed the former open-source software personnel of Sun Microsystems, other companies are benefiting from the transition. Among those is cloud computing and hosting vendor Rackspace, which recently hired four of the key open source developers behind the Drizzle database effort, a spin-off from the Sun-owned MySQL database.
Rackspace uses MySQL today in its infrastructure but has said that it sees its limitations when it comes to cloud deployments. That’s the reason behind the company’s interest in Drizzle. In some ways, Drizzle is an enhanced version of MySQL, providing additional cloud scalability features, but Rackspace said the project is not quite ready for prime time yet — but with its investment, it’s hoping to help get it there.
“We’ve had issues with scaling MySQL in a multi-tenant environment like ours, so we’ve been looking at other database options and have been looking at Drizzle for over a year,” Jonathan Bryce, co-founder of the Rackspace Cloud, told InternetNews.com.”When the opportunity came up to really get serious about funding Drizzle, we jumped at it and were able to bring on basically the entire core team that is working on Drizzle.”
