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05 October 2007

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.

1 comment:

Arjen Lentz said...

Well, please do post your updates to Brian's repo!