Sphinx is a full-text search engine, distributed under GPL version 2. Commercial license is also available for embedded use.
Generally, it's a standalone search engine, meant to provide fast, size-efficient and relevant fulltext search functions to other applications. Sphinx was specially designed to integrate well with SQL databases and scripting languages. Currently built-in data sources support fetching data either via direct connection to MySQL or PostgreSQL, or using XML pipe mechanism (a pipe to indexer in special XML-based format which Sphinx recognizes).
Today I finally plugged-in the Yahoo Boss Mashup Framework into the Google App Engine environment. Google App Engine (GAE) provides a pretty sweet yet simple platform for executing Python applications on Google's infrastructure. The Boss Mashup Framework (BMF) provides Python API's for accessing Yahoo's Search API's as well remixing data a la SQL constructs. Running BMF on top of GAE is a seemingly natural progression, and quite arguably the easiest way to deploy Boss - so I spent today porting BMF to the GAE platform.
See also http://bossy.appspot.com/qa?query=who+is+brad+pitt+married+to
Database systems are notorious for being hard to use. It is even more difficult to integrate data from multiple sources and collaborate on large data sets with people outside your organization. Without an easy way to offer all the collaborators access to the same server, data sets get copied, emailed and ftp'd--resulting in multiple versions that get out of sync very quickly.
Today we're introducing Google Fusion Tables on Labs, an experimental system for data management in the cloud. It draws on the expertise of folks within Google Research who have been studying collaboration, data integration, and user requirements from a variety of domains. Fusion Tables is not a traditional database system focusing on complicated SQL queries and transaction processing. Instead, the focus is on fusing data management and collaboration: merging multiple data sources, discussion of the data, querying, visualization, and Web publishing. We plan to iteratively add new features to the systems as we get feedback from users.
The Drizzle project is building a database optimized for Cloud and Net applications. It is being designed for massive concurrency on modern multi-cpu/core architecture. The code is originally derived from MySQL.