MySQL employees have announced a fork of the open source MySQL database, named "Drizzle", that focuses on what they see as the essential features for an online database. Brian Aker, MySQL's director of architecture at Sun, suggests web applications, databases without integrated business processes, cloud environments and multi-core architectures as potential applications for this trimmed down version of MySQL server.

Drizzle will omit many of the features that have been added as a result of pressure from business MySQL users, such as stored procedures, triggers, prepared statements and views. The query cache, which speeds up execution of repeated identical SQL queries, will also be removed. Field types have also been simplified. The plan is not for full compatibility with MySQL, but it is possible that these functions may be reintroduced in the future. According to Aker, Drizzle will be run as a genuine open source project, outside Sun Microsystems, with the code licenced under GPL2. The developers plan to use open source libraries wherever possible with the transactional InnoDB being used as the underlying database engine.

The Drizzle project, despite having a number of Sun employees within its development team, is being developed outside of Sun and MySQL AB.

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