The motivation behind Drizzle is that MySQL is adding more and more features as time goes on, which isn’t a bad thing per se, but for many applications – especially web-based ones – brings too many unneeded bells and whistles. What’s needed is a fast, minimalist database management system, and that’s what Drizzle is designed to be.
Several data types, like all the spacial relationship ones, have been removed, as has stuff such as stored procedures and views. Indeed, Drizzle is far more about removing things than adding them – it’s a process of stripping out everything the developers and community consider to be extraneous. One of its FAQs is in fact headed “This is not an SQL-compliant relational…”, and the answer is simply “That’s true. We do not aim to be that.” Short, pithy, and to the point. Since much of our current work revolves around web-based applications, Drizzle is definitely something we’re interested in. We have applications that require the full power of MySQL – ones that use stored procedures, FULLTEXT indexes and so on – but many just use the database server to store simple data, and for that Drizzle would be more than adequate.
Currently, Drizzle isn’t in a state where the developers recommend using it for production, but work is progressing and hopefully before too long it will be mature enough to give it a try. As always, we’ll keep you informed.
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