Storage Engines at the MySQL Conference

I’ll be following closely the progression of Storage Engines available in the MySQL Database server, well soon to be available when 5.1 gets to GA (hopefully by end of Q2 which is what we have been told). Tick, Tick, time is running out.

PrimeBase XT (PBXT) and Blob Streaming is a focus as PrimeBase Technologies, the company which I want to note for people is an Open Source company, committed at providing an open source alternative to the other commercial players. You also have at the MySQL Conference talks on the the existing InnoDB from Innobase (a subsidiary of market RDBMS leader Oracle). There is a Nitro presentation, an Infobright presentation, no Solid presentation surprisingly (the IBM news happening after submissions closed). We also have from MySQL, presentations on the internally developed storage engines Falcon and Maria, both products that won’t even be in 5.1 but 6.0, however Maria is presently a different branch of 5.1 so I don’t know how that works. Will it be in 5.1?

But what I want to seek is more news of KickFire, a Diamond Sponsor, an engine with embedded H/W, something that’s been obviously worked on in reasonable stealth. For me it’s not just interesting, it’s a competitor in our technology space, so I’ve been researching Joseph Chamdani and some of his patents.

Plenty of news in the past few weeks on Kickfire including Kickfire Update by Keith Murphy on April 3, Kickfire: stream-processing SQL queries by Baron Schwartz on April 4, Kickfire looking to push MySQL limits by Farhan Mashraqi on April 4, and Kickfire Kickfire Kickfire by Peter Zaitsev on April 4, and myself back on March 23.

So what can I make from the lack of company information and posted information to date.

  • Hardware based acceleration.
  • No Solid State Drive (SSD) Technology, at least not yet but C2App mentions SSD.
  • Data Warehousing, lending to thinking it’s not a transactional storage engine
  • A new storage engine and a new approach to data storage. I find this surprising, as it takes years to develop a feature complete storage engine, and most new 5.1 storage engines are indeed existing products, take Nitro, Solid, Infobright and Falcon. Only PBXT has been written from the ground up for MySQL 5.1, so looking to know more about it’s development
  • Expensive, it’s dedicated H/W + (assuming) MySQL Enterprise + Storage Engine

Comments

  1. says

    Maria is based off 5.1, but you will not see it when 5.1 goes GA

    New engines (falcon, maria) should only really be around in 6.0 and beyond (i.e. when the engine itself is out of its beta state)

  2. John David Duncan says

    ScaleDB will also be there, demonstrating their shared-disk clustering with an index structure that encodes foreign key relationships.

  3. says

    Not to nit-pick…but my name is Keith Murphy .. not Kevin Murphy. Kevin is actually the name of my brother. So thats a little weird :)

    Keith

  4. says

    Will have a BoF about hierarchies/graphs (dealing with them relationally) and the work that Kim and I are doing on a storage engine that does exactly that.

  5. Justin Swanhart says

    Late to the game but…

    Kickfire is transactional storage engine. It is fully ACID compliant and supports multiple isolation levels, up to and including serializable. The locking strategy may lend itself to OLTP workloads. The massive parallelization of the SQL chip combined with the vertical column store and the ability to operate directly on compressed data make the solution ideal for DW/DSS systems.

  6. Justin Swanhart says

    Meant to say “the locking strategy may NOT lend itself to OLTP workloads”.