Adrian Otto, System Architect at Rackspace, is touting the merits of Drizzle in his blog post on Rackspace’s Cloud Blog. Drizzle is projected to be a lightweight database designed specifically for web applications and cloud computing.

It started with Brian Aker of MySQL, who wanted to fork MySQL 6.0, remove anything that doesn’t comply with maximum performance. Things like stored procedures, triggers, MyISAM, 32-bit support, obscure data types, language encodings or collations will all be missing from Drizzle in order to keep it slim and fast. A full list of the differences between Drizzle and MySQL is available at http://drizzle.org/wiki/MySQL_Differences. In exchange, you will have scalability and some great security features (like disallowing two queries to be sent together separated by a semi-colon).

Drizzle is just about production ready and has several sponsors as well as an open source developer community made up of over a hundred contributors worldwide, but they could always use more help. If you are a developer looking to help, stop by http://launchpad.net/drizzle or talk to the Drizzle team in the IRC channel #drizzle on Freenode, and if you have suggestions for features you’d like to see, stop by their Feature Requests/Blueprints page.