Jim Starkey, who joined MySQL through our acquisition of his company Netfrastructure, has been working along with his team on the Falcon storage engine, which is part of MySQL 6.0, currently in alpha. Jim has a history of introducing significant innovations in database technology throughout his career including his work on Blobs and multi-generational storage (or MVCC). Right now the focus of the Falcon team is on optimizing performance for modern multi-core CPUs with large amounts of memory. We're seeing some pretty significant performance gains that will come out over the next few months. And there's still a lot of untapped potential in what Falcon will be able to do going forward.
Jim took some time out of his schedule to answer a few questions for Dr. Dobb's Journal and the result is a short but insightful interview called Databases: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. More info on Falcon is available on the MySQL developer zone.
- Dr Dobbs Journal: Databases: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
- MySQL: Falcon, White paper, FAQ, Docs, Downloads, Understanding Falcon - Part 1, 2, 3
In the DDJ article, Jim has an excellent point about how applications are moving into the database process. See http://blogs.sas.com/sasdummy/index.php?/archives/22-Lead-an-application-to-data-drink-faster.html for an example of that approach happening at SAS.
Posted by: chris | November 14, 2007 at 10:28 AM