Monty Widenius (creator of MyISAM and MySQL) has announced the first public release of the Maria engine. This basically sounds like crash-safe MyISAM crossed with the InnoDB featureset, and there’s a Bitkeeper archive here.

It would certainly be nice to have fulltext column indexing in a format which supports ACID and row-level locking, together with the capability for foreign keys. It’s useful in some cases to have a table-per-file and would be even better if it was crash-safe 😛

I guess it’ll end up being version 2 or 3 before it’s ready for production, however. I certainly wouldn’t feel safe using something like that before it’s been through the mill at larger MySQL installations such as Yahoo, either.