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Sun Celebrates Third-Party MySQL Storage Engines
April 2008 by Marc Jacob
Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced new and enhanced third-party support for the MySQL(TM) database’s unique
pluggable storage engine architecture. The MySQL Certified Storage Engine Program enables commercial and community database engine developers to certify that their software has been tested and is compatible with Sun’s MySQL Database
Server – helping to assure MySQL users that these certified engines have reached high-level
standards of usability, performance and integration.
Sun also helps promote these third-party solutions to its MySQL database customers and open
source community through a range of co-marketing activities.
The following database engines are a part of the certified partner program:
Developed by Innobase OY, a subsidiary of Oracle(R) Corporation, InnoDB is the most popular
transactional database engine for MySQL, with integrated support for crash recovery, row level
locking, and referential integrity for MySQL applications. Sun distributes and supports InnoDB in
both MySQL Enterprise and the MySQL Community Server. Innobase is a MySQL Enterprise
Platinum partner and a Gold Sponsor of the 2008 MySQL User Conference.
An early-adopter version of InnoDB Plug-in for MySQL 5.1 (announced at the conference), is
available under the GPL open source license and can be downloaded for free. The new InnoDB Plugin for MySQL allows MySQL users to
dynamically load a new version of the InnoDB storage engine into the MySQL server for greater
performance, flexibility, reliability and ease of use. The InnoDB Plugin for MySQL introduces
data compression and the ability to quickly create indexes, among other important new
features.
Kickfire provides the first high-performance, easy-to-use database appliance for the burgeoning
MySQL market. Based on a patented SQL chip that packs the power of tens of CPUs into an
exceptionally small, low-power form factor — Kickfire delivers a quantum leap in performance
efficiency avoiding the hardware build out, power, and space costs of today’s data warehouse
and database offerings. By delivering astoundingly fast query performance out of the box,
Kickfire enables organizations to use MySQL for demanding business intelligence, reporting, and analysis rather than migrating to costly, non-open source alternatives. Kickfire appliances
scale from gigabytes to terabytes and are based on commodity hardware and Linux. They
leverage existing storage as well as the openness of MySQL and its entire ecosystem to
provide compatibility and rapid deployment.
PBXT is a highly-scalable, transactional storage engine for the MySQL Database Server. The
product is sponsored by the open source company PrimeBase Technologies
(www.primebase.org), a MySQL Platinum-level Partner. With a "write-once" log-based
architecture, PBXT is ideally suited for Solid State Drive technology (SSD). Key features of
PBXT include: Fully ACID compliant, MVCC (multi-version concurrency control), foreign key
support and streaming of media data including video, audio (e.g. MP3), images and other
binary large objects (BLOBs) with the MySQL Database Server.
With its Brighthouse solution, Infobright has fundamentally reinvented data warehouse
architecture. Brighthouse represents a departure from other data warehouse solutions that
require building and maintaining data partitions and indexes, or investing in large hardware
systems. In sharp contrast, Brighthouse achieves breakthrough performance — particularly for
highly complex, ad-hoc queries — with its flexible, patent-pending Knowledge Grid and
integrated Optimizer.
In addition, MySQL offers a number of its own storage engines, including MyISAM, Cluster,
Memory, and Archive. Falcon, MySQL’s newest transactional database engine, is being
designed for large-memory, multi-threaded and multi-core CPU applications such as highvolume
Web sites. There is also a new experimental crash-safe version of MyISAM being
developed under the code-name Maria.
