Drizzle

What Does Drizzle Mean?

Drizzle is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) based on MySQL. Drizzle is built for Web and cloud computing applications and has a smaller footprint than MySQL. Commands for Drizzle are written using structured query language (SQL). Its software license is based on the GNU General Public License (GPL) as well as parts of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license.

Techopedia Explains Drizzle

Drizzle was initiated by Brian Aker in 2008. Now a product of a community-driven project, Drizzle releases are given out every two weeks, with most of its milestones occurring every three to four months. Drizzle, which is written in C++, was based on version 6.0 of MySQL. (Drizzle is not like SQLite in that it is not designed for embedded systems.) Drizzle is now being developed by people from Canonical Ltd., Google, Six Apart, Sun Microsystems, Rackspace and Intel. This RDBMS is designed for Unix-like operating systems including Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and FreeBSD.

To come up with a smaller version of MySQL, developers removed nonessential code, refactored whatever code remained and made it run on a microkernel. The operations that were removed from the kernel are offered as pluggable components.

Despite being a stripped-down version of MySQL, Drizzle already includes the following features:

• POSIX compliance
• Pluggable architecture for views
• Stored procedures
• User-defined functions
• Storage engines
• Intelligent proxy
• Multi CPU
• Optimized field types
• Efficient memory usage
• InnoDB default storage engine
• Localized command line tools

Some of the data types supported by Drizzle are:

• INT
• DOUBLE
• FLOAT
• VARCHAR
• BLOB
• DATE
• TIMESTAMP
• DATETIME
• ENUM