July 25, 2006

Solid’s MySQL engine

Solid Information Technology is making the beta of its MySQL engine available for download midday on Tuesday. So I talked with them today, mercifully unembargoed. Here’s the story.

Solid is taking its existing core DBMS engine, and open sourcing it, which I presume means the code has been or is being:

and so on. Of course, it’s also been engineered to interface to MySQL.

However, it hasn’t yet been reoptimized for MySQL in any way, or for the different application profile that can be expected in these new uses. Optimization is coming soon, with big gains anticipated in performance/scalability/whatever. Beyond that, all I could get about scalability is that it’s been tested internal up to 8 processors and/or hundreds of users, and it scales. How well? I don’t know. However, and this is encouraging, Solid plans to release benchmarking stuff so that anybody in the community can run benchmarks on the platforms of their choice. (I presume that includes things like the data and SQL for the benchmarks themselves, and maybe some testing tools as well.)

Solid is not at this time open sourcing its add-ons for memory-centric data management, high-availability/hot standby, or sophisticated replication.* However, the core engine alone has a lot to recommend it: Full transactional capability, full read/write multiversion concurrency control, online backup/continuous availability, and so on. (The latter feature won’t be in the initial beta, but is promised by the time of GA, which is planned for Q4.) And it has an impressive track record, with over 3 million instances sold or in use, mainly for utterly unattended, often multi-user and/or transactional, use.

*I.e., they’re open sourcing the guts of Solid EmbeddedEngine, but not BoostEngine, CarrierGrade Option, or SmartFlow Option.

Clearly, traditional Solid applications (embedded telecom/networking) don’t have exactly the same profile as current or future MySQL apps. In particular, that zero-administration track record is achieved in closed environments, running one or a very small number of unchanging applications. Nor do Solid databases typically run the kinds of complex SQL statements commonly found in business applications. On the other hand, running that kind of a SQL is a much better understood problem now than, say, when Sybase struggled with it a decade ago. So I’m cautiously optimistic that the MySQL/Solid combination will turn out to be a potent low/mid-range competitor, for traditional business and/or web RDBMS apps.

How well they do in hardcore data warehousing, alternate datatypes, etc. is a different matter. I’m not aware of any plans for MySQL to add significant capabilities beyond OLTP, or for MySQL to try to be competitive in anything except traditional tabular, alphanumeric datatypes and structures.

Comments

4 Responses to “Solid’s MySQL engine”

  1. l1t on July 25th, 2006 8:41 am

    where is the url of beta application

  2. Testing The Web Dot Com » Blog Archive » Solid?s MySQL engine on July 25th, 2006 11:19 am

    […] Read the full article by Curt Monash […]

  3. Jonathan Cheyer on July 25th, 2006 4:25 pm

    You can download the solidDB for MySQL beta at http://dev.soliddb.com/download/. It is also listed as project on MySQL’s forge site: http://forge.mysql.com/projects/view.php?id=139

  4. l1t on July 26th, 2006 10:05 am

    FTP 目录 /pub/ 位于 developers.soliddb.com

    07/25/2006 12:02下午 目录 .
    07/25/2006 12:02下午 目录 ..
    07/25/2006 10:55上午 目录 prototype
    07/25/2006 12:03下午 20,766,388 solidmysql-5.0.22-beta-0020.tar.gz
    07/25/2006 11:15上午 32,704,167 solidmysql-5.0.22-linux-i686-beta-0020.tar.gz
    07/25/2006 11:19上午 40,899,549 solidmysql-5.0.22-win-beta-0019.zip
    07/25/2006 11:21上午 24,291,102 solidmysql-5.0.22-win-src-beta-0019.zip

    FTP 目录 /pub/prototype/ 位于 developers.soliddb.com

    07/25/2006 10:55上午 目录 .
    07/25/2006 10:55上午 目录 ..
    04/24/2006 05:04下午 36,489 gettingstartedlinux.pdf
    04/24/2006 05:04下午 31,993 gettingstartedwindows.pdf
    06/04/2006 03:09上午 24,623 releasenotes.pdf
    06/02/2006 04:18上午 15,355 release_notes.txt
    05/31/2006 10:02上午 6,311,650 solidDBSE-l2x-06.00.0004.bin
    05/31/2006 10:02上午 5,747,535 solidDBSE-w32-06.00.0004.exe

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