Drizzle (database server)

Drizzle is a discontinued free software/open-source relational database management system (DBMS) that was forked from the now-defunct 6.0 development branch of the MySQL DBMS. Like MySQL, Drizzle had a client/server architecture and uses SQL as its primary command language. Old Drizzle files are distributed under version 2 and 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPL) with portions, including the protocol drivers and replication messaging under the BSD license. Early work on the fork was done mid-2008 by Brian Aker. Ongoing development was handled by a team of contributors that included staff members from Canonical Ltd., Google, Six Apart, Sun Microsystems, Rackspace, Data Differential, Blue Gecko, Intel, Percona, Hewlett-Packard, Red Hat, and others. Drizzle source code, along with instructions on compiling it, are available via the project's Launchpad website. In October 2010, Drizzle had 13,478 total contributions, 96 total contributors, and 37 active contributors. It was also announced that Drizzle had entered Beta,. The first GA version was released in March 2011. Drizzle has actively participated in the Google Summer of Code Project since 2010. By late 2013 the project's active phase had come to an end. In July 2016 the maintainers concluded that the time had come for "winding things up officially" because "none of us have any time to dedicate to Drizzle anymore". Drizzle is targeted at the web-infrastructure and cloud computing markets. The developers of the product describe it as a "smaller, slimmer and (hopefully) faster version of MySQL". Drizzle is written in the C++ programming language, and stores its string data in the UTF-8 format. It is being developed for modern Unix-like operating systems, including Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris – in general, any OS that conforms to POSIX and has a working implementation of the GNU Autotools. Microsoft Windows is not supported at this time, mainly for lack of Autotools support, but there has been discussion of how to accomplish this in a sensible manner.