The Future of MySQL

In recent years many new features have been added to the MySQL codebase, mostly so called enterprise grade features such as support for triggers, stored procedures and views. As a result, MySQL has gained some new customers in applications other than web hosting. However, all these features have not been adopted in one of MySQL’s strongest fields: hosting databases for web sites. They do cause problems: the size of the code base has increased, leading to more bugs and less programmer time spend on increasing performance or MySQL’s core features.

Now that Sun Microsystems has taken over MySQL (and I have become a Sun certified MySQL professional), and Oracle is attempting to take over Sun, I am uncertain of the future of the MySQL database server software. If the takeover of MySQL by Oracle succeeds, it makes no sense for Oracle to have two competing database products. It would be logical if Oracle tried to kill the MySQL software in favor of its own database product suite. That would suit MySQL’s latest clients, but not so much its more traditional clients in the web business.

The Drizzle project is a fork of the MySQL source that is attempting to create an alternative to MySQL, specialized for web hosting and cloud applications. This will both make sure that an alternative remains when Oracle kills off the MySQL database server and that a web specialized database server will remain available for all us web developers. Another alternative to MySQL is the MariaDB SQL server, another fork of the MySQL source.

Finally, MySQL has announced the Falcon storage engine for at least several years now (I remember having heard a presentation about it at the PHPFreakz congres in 2007). The Falcon storage engine is supposed to be an ACID compliant, fast storage engine. However, there still has not been a release of the Falcon storage engine. Back when it was announced, there were some problems with the InnoDB storage engine, but these problems have been adressed by companies such as Percona and Google. They have created patches to improve locking performance on multi-core servers and created ways to back up tables without taking the server down.

So, what will be the future of MySQL? The Drizzle and MariaDB projects offer alternatives should the MySQL database server be killed by Oracle. Most flaws in InnoDB have been addressed by Google and Percona, so we do not need the Falcon storage engine. It looks as though most options have been covered, but in the future our relational database may not be MySQL but Maria.