Open Source Weblog

"It seems that enterprises are ready to deploy open source databases for mission critical applications," she said. "The basic architecture of our solidDB is similar to Innobase. It can be a good replacement for Innobase but also the next tier up."

You would expect Lubet to talk up solidDB in comparison with the InnoDB engine that had been MySQL's preferred engine and was acquired by Oracle along with Innobase in October 2005, but she also has reason to suggest that InnoDB is unlikely to take the step up.

Although MySQL and Oracle have renewed their agreement for InnoDB, the terms were "business as usual" according to MySQL's vice president of marketing, Zack Urlocker. As Lubet comments, that does not suggest a lot of investment heading InnoDB's way from Oracle. "With the contract on the same terms, they are not going to throw ten times more engineers at it," she said.

The prototype solidDB will be launched at MySQL's user conference next week while a beta version is due in July and full availability in the fourth quarter. Incidentally, there is more to the relationship to come, but some parts of the embargo remain…

Meanwhile, as I stated last week, MySQL will be offering a choice of storage engines, including a new transaction engine developed by Interbase creator Jim Starkey, whose Netfrastructure company MySQL acquired in February.

Starkey will be presenting details of the OLTP storage engine at MySQL's user event.