Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Catching Up on OLD News - SolidDB

Well, another year has passed and I plan to write a quick year-in-review post, but I wanted to highlight a particularly interesting piece of news from the week prior to Christmas.

IBM announced the acquisition of SolidDB.  IBM has done this, according to their public statements to better compete with the Oracle Times Ten in-memory database, but it once again shows the fragility of the MySQL product set.

In the last 2 years, MySQL has seen its most robust storage engines bought by would-be competitors.  In late 2005, Oracle bought InnoDB who provided MySQL with the only real transactional storage engine. 

Now, IBM has purchased SolidDB, who provided the only other real transactional storage engine for MySQL.

This means that MySQL may have to rely heavily on their yet-to-be-released Falcon storage engine.  Word is that it will become GA with MySQL 6.0. 

If you had a choice between a brand spankin new storage engine or one that has already been proven, what would you choose?

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