Narayan Newton (aka nnewton) talks about the future of MySQL and it's various forks and different patch sets that are emerging. He's the lead sysadmin for drupal.org, a database optimization expert with Tag1 Consulting, and the co-maintainer of Pressflow, which is the high-performance Drupal distribution.

Since Sun bought MySQL and then Oracle bought Sun, a lot of the MySQL developers have left to Monty Program Ab and there are more decisions that need to be made by database administrators.

There is an active issue on Drupal.org that discusses the various forks, and whether Drupal should recommend a particular flavor of MySQL, and Newton summarizes the current MySQL landscape as having the following different options:

• MySQL/ORACLE
• MySQL/MariaDB (Monty + a lot of the original mysql devs are here)
• MySQL/Percona (Are partners of MariaDB and say they are going to switch to distributing it)
• MySQL/Ourdelta (Are already just redistributing MariaDB)
• MySQL/Drizzle (Not production ready)

Since the recording of this interview, it appears as though Percona and others are converging around MariaDB as a drop-in replacement for MySQL. Newton also mentions Oracle's MySQL 5.5, a set of patches from Percona, Percona's XtraDB, the Open Database Alliance (which includes Monty Program and Percona), the InnoDB Plugin as well as Google patch set for MySQL and Facebook patch set for MySQL. Other notable MySQL fork products include Drizzle and OurDelta.

Here's a couple of useful graphics to help visualize the MySQL landscape:

• Graphic of MySQL forks as of March 2010
• Graphic of MySQL forks as of August 2009

Newton also talks about benchmarking, the grinder load test framework, and the limitations of using micro-benchmarks apart from testing on actual web sites. He also talks about how Drupal 7 gives the ability to run multiple backends including a combination of MySQL and memcache and MongoDB and even scaling writes with Cassandra.

For more information, be sure to check out Newton's DrupalCon talk entitled The Future Of MySQL: Forks, Patches And Decisions