Adventures in the Simple and the Complex

In Is MySQL simple or complex (or both)?, Mike Kruckenberg asks:

So the question is . . . What happens to the people who really just wanted a simple, no frills, easy to use database. Based on the message, MySQL is no longer the database for them. Right?

MySQL 5.0 has gained a lot of features, and some of these features such as the procedural extensions, are as often a benefit for a project as they are creating problems for a project due to feature abuse. Having more features makes the product larger and more complex as well. So, yes, 5.0 is a lot more complex than older versions, and it carries around a lot of baggage that many traditional MySQL users don't need - and yet the same features are crucial for others.

This dilemma one reason why I look forward to the beginnings of modularization that we see with 5.1 - loadable fulltext parsers are only a beginning. Ultimately, I hope to see loadable storage engines together with loadable SQL syntax extensions (loading a storage engine also extends at least CREATE TABLE and ALTER TABLE syntax with the options needed for these extensions), and perhaps even loadable everything such as loadable stored procedure interpreters - CREATE SP LANGUAGE AS "/usr/lib/libperl.so" or similar, if you like it.

Growing in such a direction would make MySQL at the same time a simpler tool than before - in an ideal world, the core would have no features at all besides a DSO loader. At the same time it would turn MySQL into something more flexible and complex than ever before - a data storage and retrieval framework that can ultimately mix and match extensions as you need them for your project and contains only the code and functionality that you need. And if something is missing, just write it yourself. Write only what is missing and merge it with the rest within the framework.

(Disclaimer: /me is a MySQL employee, but the above is my vision of MySQL, and it may or may not differ from the company vision. :-)
(title with apologies to Murray Gell-Mann)