Google to contribute to MySQL?

Google has been a long time user and a long time supporter of the open source database, MySQL. Recently, Google gave MySQL several recommendations that they would like to be incorporated into the next major release of MySQL. While the changes have not been officially accepted, it is very encouraging to see major corporations join the development bandwagon of some of the most mainstream open source projects. In my opinion, MySQL is one of the most commonly used open source applications in the corporate world.

Google long has been known to be a user of the open-source MySQL database software, but the search powerhouse this week published its own changes to the project.

“We think MySQL is a fantastic data storage solution, and as our projects push the requirements for the database in certain areas, we’ve made changes to enhance MySQL itself, mainly in the areas of high availability and manageability,” Google software engineer Mark Callaghan said on the company’s Google Code blog on Monday.

High availability refers to the idea of keeping computing services working even if the server they’re running on fails. Switching a service to a backup machine is called failover, and although the technology is decades old, it’s difficult to implement.

Google + MySQL – [News.com.com]