From the article:

Marten Mickos

Open source database company MySQL said Wednesday it’s opening up its database to several storage engines–products that help determine how data is stored and indexed–in a move aimed at giving its customers greater ability to customize their databases.

MySQL’s new certification program will allow partners and community developers to build their own storage engines, to give customers and users the ability to create custom engines and plug them into MySQL’s database architecture. Storage engines are essentially the kernels of open source databases.