Small is the new big, or maybe less is the new way to handle more, or something to that effect. The category of smaller databases for larger data sets has a new entry, Drizzle. As Brian explains:
Stored Procedures, Views, Triggers, Query Cache, and Prepared Statements are gone for now. The field types have been simplified and there is an open debate about the SHOW commands (I am falling into the camp that think they may just belong in the client application but not in the server).
The code is based on MySQL, but cuts down on many of its features and options. You can choose any storage engine, as long as it’s InnoDB, and pick any character encoding from the set of UTF-8. Less code means you can fit it in smaller places, but that’s not quite the intent:
We are focusing on multi-core architecture. This is not designed to run on a wrist watch (hint, go use SQLite). We support both 32bit and 64bit but the class of machine we are targetting is 64bit. We are making design decisions which assume very large amounts of RAM will be made available to the DB.
It’s interesting, though not quite surprising, that the way to handle more data is by having less tools and management on top of the storage engine. Pretty much everything I touch nowadays treats the database as an indexing storage engine. Keep the logic to the application tier.
What would be interesting to see is whether Drizzle remains mostly relational — it is after all derived from MySQL — morph into something else by dropping the RDBMS origins, or ends up a storage engine for a higher abstraction, maybe a BigTable clone written to use it.
Either way, welcome.