Posted on 3 Comments

What to do with the Falcon engine?

Keep it. Make sure it gets correctly positioned in the coming months.

It appears that with the Oracle acquisition, the reason-to-exist for Falcon is regarded as gone (a non-Oracle-owned InnoDB replacement), previously seen as a strategic imperative – much delayed though.

But look, each engine has unique architectural aspects and thus a niche where it does particularly well. Given that Falcon exists, I’d suggest to not just “ditch it” but have it live as one of the pluggables. What Oracle will do to it is unknown, but Sun/MySQL can make sure of this positioning by making sure in the coming months that Falcon works in 5.1 as a pluggable engine, perhaps also creating a separate bzr project/tree for it on Launchpad.

Then the good work can find its way into the real world, now.

Posted on 3 Comments

3 thoughts on “What to do with the Falcon engine?

  1. AFAIK, there is no intrinsic reason why Falcon must be on 6.0 and so a Falcon for 5.1 would be a good move.

    Right now, Falcon’s biggest problems is stability. Once they have fixed the crashing bugs, people could then seriously start testing it.

    Falcon’s sad loss is Hakan’s excellent diligence in testing but I am sure we shall see him again soon, testing other storage engines…

  2. 🙂

    But they have Philip now …

  3. My point has been for a while, getting it available as a pluggable for 5.1 would make it way more likely that people will test it – and provide more feedback. I think this is an excellent opportunity to make it so, as there clearly is no product-development reasoning any more.

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