People are asking me if Percona will support Drizzle and what is in general our position regarding this project.
First about Support. We surely will support the customers if they select to run the Drizzle instead of MySQL Server. For us it is same as supporting MySQL Server with custom patches, which we do. In general our Support Policy is very open ended – we would support wide variety of systems, and we’re just being open about our experience with such system and ability to help if need arises.
Will we Recommend Drizzle ? We recommend what makes sense to the customers. If MySQL is not the best choice for the customers we’ll be open about it. Drizzle will need to prove it stable and being better fit for certain group of customers and we will recommend it it in such cases. It is similar to storage engines – will we recommend Falcon or Maria instead of Innodb ? Sure we will, in cases then they will work better. Drizzle is in active development right now and it will take some time before it stabilizes to be ready to be used by wide groups in production.
Will we Contribute to Drizzle ? Our focus with Percona Patchset having MySQL improvements which are ready to be used in production now, which speed things up, improve operations or help analyze performance. We release all out patches as GPL and we would be happy for them to be included in Drizzle or any other MySQL Forks or Patch Sets. Whenever we will have some people actively working on Drizzle remains open question. As customers will be interested in having Drizzle work better on them we surely will do it. We’re also likely to be testing Drizzle to understand sweetspots and problems.
About the Author
Peter ZaitsevPeter managed the High Performance Group within MySQL until 2006, when he founded Percona. Peter has a Master's Degree in Computer Science and is an expert in database kernels, computer hardware, and application scaling.
Thanks for the clarification of your position – I was really wondering what it is going to be.
Hi!
Thank you for not telling people to use Drizzle right now 🙂
It really is not ready, and no one should be putting it into production/testing with it. Right now we just want contributors of all shades.
Now will Drizzle be taking patches from you? I certainly suspect I will be pulling some of your patches. We have been taking bits from Google and Ebay so far (plus a few from other companies). Our I_S is being rewritten and once it is done I expect we will be looking at what you and Proven Scaling has been doing.
Cheers,
-Brian
Cool. Thanks Brian 🙂
Btw, do I need to purchase any kind of license from Percona and/or Mysql to use the percona mysql ? (I’m still a bit confused with the model used by Mysql Enterprise source tree).
Pablo,
The license for Percona patches is GPL and MySQL Enterprise sources is also GPL so you can use MySQL with Percona patches free of charge if you comply with GPL requirements.
Awesome. Thanks peter.
“We recommend what makes sense to the customers.”
This is the core responsibility of any managed service provider. At rackAID, we often tell people NO. We tell them no, because there is no compelling reason to adopt the technology they are requesting. They will only see increased support costs with no measurable improvement in service. Based on Percona’s reputation, I would expect the same from them.
Jeff,
We try not to force customers to do things in a certain ways. We give our recommendations and customers can follow our advice or do things their own way. Doing things wrong way may increase their support costs or may make it impossible for us to help them – for example if customer choses to have just replication and no backups we may not be able to help them to recover the data if someone runs update which trashed data. It is also possible for customers to pick technology which do not support – ie use Oracle, in this case they just would need someone else help with these systems.
We take the same approach, but we do say no to some requests. If our expertise permits, we will recommend alternatives, but we don’t want to engage in something we cannot support well. We are a small firm with specific expertise. In the past, when I’ve reluctant ventured into areas outside our scope of services, the results were not favorable. So we stick to what we know well and if we cannot help or support a solution, we refer clients elsewhere.
Jeff,
I think there is a difference what kind of services we offer. We do not always provide full operation support to the clients. Sometimes we cover everything, sometimes we focus on MySQL only and sometimes the client may have their own DBAs to keep things rolling so we just come and fix what is broken. This is customer choice which they make on cost and convenience reasons – for example many like to keep operations in house and this is fine with us. We also would not take responsibilities which we can’t handle. For example we have been helping people running MySQL on Windows in production to tune their queries but we would not do full operations support on Windows because we do not have enough experience with it. We also do not think it is good idea 🙂 At the same time we would not always push people to move to Linux/Unix – is shop moving away from MS SQL for cost reason having no Linux experience but years of running large scale Windows based data centers can well stay with Windows.