Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to remember MySQL 3.23...

Is anyone still running it I wonder? We held out for a long time before ugrading to 4.0 and finally 4.1. By that time, we were so smitten with MySQL, we were ready for 5.0, 5.1, 6.0, and whatever is next. After a while, we couldn't wait until there was a new version! But, it is nice to remember our roots sometimes...

Where you around when MySQL 3.23 was released? We certainly were.

Many of us remember thinking about this new open-source hotrod, known as MySQL that was transforming dynamically-driven Web sites. We downloaded it immediately and started "playing" with it. Within no time, we found that we were building all of our sites with a MySQL back-end, even the ones that would have been fine as static sites!

We soon began work on a custom PHP backend to allow our clients to access their database and make updates. This was before the days of other such products available now. After writing a custom back-end countless times, we decided it was time to write a common one with a simple configuration file that we could simply plug-in to their site. We acheived our goal and kept maintaining it for several years! We will occassionally pull this out if we are putting together a site for friends or some other small project since we are not as active developing Web sites today as we are being MySQL DBA's.

Anyway, back to MySQL...

Do you remember when MySQL was entirely open-source and Monty's baby? Do you remember when there was no such thing as MySQL Enterprise version? Yes, we know that offering "Enterprise" support has made MySQL viable to larger companies who are not open-source lovers. We embrace that as well. It is just amazing how much has changed with MySQL over the years. How much it has matured!

Do you remember MySQL back when replication was still a rudimentary system that seemed to crash regularly and had to be manually fixed? Do you remember what it was like to do development and not even think about normalizing code, writing stored procedures, triggers, and such? We sure do. Sometimes we look at the current feature set of MySQL and think about how far it has come. And, we often wonder how we made it back then!

Do you remember when there was no real monitoring solution for MySQL? We remember writing so many custom plugins for things like WhatsUp to try to catch issues with the database. Now they are everywhere for almost every monitoring system on the planet, not to mention there is MySQL Enterprise Monitor.

Remember when MySQL had no real High-Availability? We remember when we thought replication was HA and not merely redundency! When LVS (Linux Virtual Server) came along, we remember scrambling to figure out how to make our databases clustered. And now, there is MySQL Cluster!

Apparently others have thought the same way -- that there are cases when MySQL is too much horse-power for the task. After looking at Drizzle, although it is based on version 6.0, it's lack of "features" reminded me of those old days. I can remember ranting about the "bloat" of some major Operating System code that we all know and love/hate. Yet, the same has happened with MySQL over the years. As new features have been added, "bloat" is a matter of fact, regardless of how good or bad the code is.

Naturally, Drizzle is capable of far more! Please don't think I am saying it is in any way inferior! Far from it! The cloud capabilities of Drizzle are very intriguing! I think it has a real future and cannot wait to see how it plays out! I have been amazed what the Drizzle team has done and is still doing!

For those needing a far less sophisticated database, there is SQLite. We came across it years ago when we were looking for a simple way to integrate a small database into a small Web site. For tasks such as this, SQLite may be a great aid. As we were refreshing our knowledge of it recently, we realized that it was more powerful than we remembered! With some of the smaller sites we had developed, it might have even been a really good solution to their needs.

Did everyone need MySQL 3.23 all those years ago? Probably not. But, we sure are glad that we got the experience working with it!

Of all of the technologies that would cause us late night calls, MySQL was on the bottom of the list of offenders! We almost never got paged out for MySQL issues it seems. The product was (and is) rock-solid in most all cases with a proper installation and configuration. We went with it somewhat because we didn't have a lot of options at that time, but we are so glad we did!