Brian "Krow" Aker's Idle Thoughts - Drizzle, InfiniDB, Column Oriented Storage

I have been asked a number of times "do you think there is a need for a column oriented database in the open source world?"

The answer has been yes!

Users and vendors have asked me this question a number of times. The problem has been most of the vendors were interested in creating closed source solutions around either Drizzle/MySQL, or, did their efforts in a way that made serious modifications to the backend (aka... made poor use of the storage engine interface).

For these reasons I have not really found myself all that thrilled to work with what has been out there. Also, I would often find that the commitment to open source was either luke warm or "we will do it, once we have some traction...".

My response to that? "Tell me more when you open source it. I'll see if it will work."

For this reason I was very happy to see Calpont do their release of Infinidb last week.

So as of this weekend?

We have a project to use their engine with Drizzle. Infinidb makes use of the storage engine interface I worked on for MySQL which is a subset of the interface we have built for Drizzle. We have had several engines ported already, but this will be the first column oriented engine we will have ported to Drizzle.

Building in different engines beyond the basic transactional engines is fun, because we get to see how the design stretches to fit additional needs. The core of Drizzle stays the same, but the micro-kernel nature of our design allows for others to expand the reach of where Drizzle can be used. Padraig started working on the engine on Friday and had it loading by the end of the weekend.

It should be fun to see what additional enhancements we can do out of the box with Infini engine :)