The storage engine API has never been my favorite part of MySQL. I haven't written a storage engine but I used to maintain a custom storage engine and migrated that from 4.0 to 5.0 so I had some experience with the API.

Is there a different API that would make it easier for innovation to come to MySQL/MariaDB? For example there is a lot going on in the write-optimized database space. Until recently we had nothing for MySQL open-source. Now we have open source TokuDB (great news). I haven't read their source but I have been told they use something that was derived from the BerkeleyDB API.

Would the BerkeleyDB API make it easier to get new storage engines into MySQL? For example, we don't have an engine optimized for in-memory workloads. And while InnoDB will have great cache hit rates when all data is in-memory. It might write much more data to disk than required.

Do we need a better API or is the current code good enough? I hope to hear from people who have done serious storage engine work.

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Mark Callaghan
mdcallag@gmail.com