"We'll let users switch between a V-4 engine and a V-12 without having to get out of their car," he said.

Currently, the most popular storage engine for MySQL is InnoDB, which was developed by Innobase Oy in Helsinki, Finland. Oracle bought Inno-base last October, sparking fears that MySQL users might be cut off from using InnoDB. Then, in February, Oracle acquired Sleepycat Software Inc., a Lincoln, Mass.-based company that had also developed a storage engine for MySQL.

Earlier this month, Oracle agreed to continue developing InnoDB for MySQL for an undisclosed number of years. Even so, many users are seeking alternatives to InnoDB, according to Mickos, who confirmed reports that he recently turned down a buyout offer from Oracle.

Jeremy Cole, a former MySQL employee who now oversees about 8,000 installations of the open-source database at Yahoo Inc., said the company uses MyISAM for applications that mostly require data reads, and InnoDB in cases where many end users may be writing information to the database simultaneously.

Cole called InnoDB a "great" technology. But he also said it is "somewhat poorly integrated" with MySQL, lacks features such as full-text search and online configuration changes, and has weak support for referential integrity.