Amira has landed

What or who is Amira?

Well... Many would know Amira is to David as My is to Monty.

Amira also has all the same letters as Maria, except that it is in PDP "middle-endian" byte order.

It is also the codename of a little known project while I was at MySQL: Soon after Oracle acquired Innobase OY, the powers that be at MySQL did not want to solely rely on InnoDB (or BerkeleyDB) as a transactional data store, mostly because they are both now owned by Oracle. So they shopped around, courted Jim Starkey, Monty wanted to do his own, or we can dig something out of the attic. Amira was the codename for the revival of the Gemini storage engine.

I admit, I have procrastinated for ages over this topic. Brain even put on his website the original sources and gave me a nudge... So I have now published the source to Launchpad.

Here it is at https://launchpad.net/amira

The plugin for MySQL 5.1 is far from complete and is the result of a couple of hours hacking I did yesterday. It builds but I can guarantee it will crash =)
It will take me a few weeks to fix it up to make it useful.

Alternatively, it should be possible to use the 5.0 version with only a few small patches into the server code. Unfortunately, I do not have a functional BitKeeper license to extract all the release versions of Amira which were internally built and tested - which is a shame. some of the earlier builds were quite stable and fast but at the time the project was canceled, there was a number of destabilizing changes done for performance improvements.
I'll have to try to remember what is was that I was doing in order to either complete the change or to back it out.

Closed-source revision control is not very useful.

Re: Gemini, Forgotten about this one aye?

Brian mentioned Gemini on his blog... As many people remember, there was a stunned silence for a while when Oracle purchased InnoBase OY only 2 years ago... Very similar to the stunned silence about 6 years ago when the suits at NuSphere tried to do a SCO. Back on to the topic at hand... Gemini. About two years ago, Brian fed me a copy of the Gemini engine saying that "Hey, you remember Gemini? Here's the code. Get it working. Don't talk about it and call it 'Amira'.". Perhaps not exactly his words but close enough.

So the Amira project had a shaky beginning... I ported the code to work on MySQL 5.0 and started examining it, removing platform-specific code, and improving the performance of it. From the first working run to the last, I think performance improved by about a factor of 10 but I don't remember specifics. The Amira project was cancelled 2Q2006. I suppose the reason why would be due to the problem of ownership - the code may be GPL but it is still copyrighted by NuSphere. No better position than the situation with InnoBase's GPL storage engine.

Now Brian has released the original code. I suppose I can commit to his repository a updated Gemini/Amira which works as a storage engine plug-in for MySQL 5.1... And if I have time, I could work on additional performance improvements which was planned but never implemented.