Drizzle: a lighter MySQL

Posted Jul 23, 2008 22:06 UTC (Wed) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047)
Parent article: Drizzle: a lighter MySQL

So...they want to remove the things that make an RDBMS worthy of the name?

What next, are they going to compromise on proper transaction support with ACID compliance?

Drizzle: a lighter MySQL

Posted Jul 24, 2008 5:52 UTC (Thu) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link] (1 responses)

A RDBMS is hardly an optimal fit for web-based applications. RDBMS are designed for small transactions from random sources with strong integrity needs. The basic assumption -- that all applications are like 1970s green screen banking systems -- isn't true of database-backed web sites. MySQL has benefited from this; for a long time it offered adequate integrity for DB-based web sites but inadequate integrity for traditional online transaction processing. There is plenty of scope for experimentation with database designs to find a better fits to web applications, data warehousing, and image storage.

There's also plenty of scope for differing emphasises. The traditional RDBMS minimises worst-case latency. This isn't the same as best average performance. The traditional RDBMS is disk I/O oriented and designed with an eye to a reasonable use of disk space. But RAM is so available in bulk quantities now, SSD gives an alternative to complex journaling designs, disks are so massive that most past trade-offs of space v performance are now wrong, but at the same time disk speed hasn't improved much at all.

There's a nice article on these points by some RDBMS pioneers at ACM Queue.

Drizzle: a lighter MySQL

Posted Jul 25, 2008 0:44 UTC (Fri) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

A RDBMS is hardly an optimal fit for web-based applications.

REALLY? Because, y'know, I develop web-based applications for a living, and we use an RDBMS (PostgreSQL) as our data backend. And, the funny thing is, it all works quite nicely. It's fast, powerful, and flexible. And my company's applications (web-based GIS and image analysis) are quite a long ways from 1970s green-screen banking systems.

Interestingly, in the article you linked, Stonebraker didn't talk much about web-based applications. He was talking more about data warehouses and real-time stream processing applications. Most web applications that I've seen don't look anything like those.