From the Jenny Craig dept.:
Brian Aker, MySQL's director of architecture, has unveiled Drizzle, a database project aimed at powering websites with massive concurrency as well as trimming superfluous functionality from MySQL.

Drizzle will have a micro-kernel architecture with code being removed from the Drizzle core and moved through interfaces into modules. Akers has already selected particular functionality for removal: modes, views, triggers, prepared statements, stored procedures, query cache, data conversion inserts, access control lists and some data types.

builderau.com.au

Drizzle Project