Drizzle is a community-driven open source project that is forked from the popular MySQL database. The Drizzle team has removed non-essential code, re-factored the remaining code and modernized the code base moving to C++. Drizzle, a lightweight fork of MySQL, released its first general availability version today. Drizzle is designed for multicore environments and cloud applications. Unlike NoSQL databases, Drizzle still uses structure queried language. Instead, it attempts to improve performance by cutting the database server down to its core.

The project was started by Sun employees in 2008, and Rackspace hired the team to work on Drizzle full time in Adrian Otto:

Drizzle dispenses with views, triggers, prepared statements, and much more. Instead additional features can be added via plugins. Drizzle makes no attempt at backwards compatibility with legacy systems such as 32-bit environments.

Charter

1. A database optimized for Cloud infrastructure and Web applications

2. Open source, open community, open design

3. Optimize memory for increased performance and parallelism

4. pen source, open community, open design

Scope

1. Re-designed modular architecture providing plugins with defined APIs
2. Simple design for ease of use and administration
3. Reliable, ACID transactional

Drizzle source tarball version 2011.03.13 has been released.