Non-blocking client implementation using standardized API for scalable data access

As programming models evolve towards functional data access patterns, it would be great to have a non-blocking, reactive network client implementation for MariaDB. The advantage of having a non-blocking I/O layer allows to scale applications by orders of magnitude.

There's an effort named R2DBC to bring Java-based, reactive database access to relational databases using a standardized API. This ticket is here to start some discussion around whether you'd be interested to look into this and how we can help.

A few resources to get you started:

• The project organization can be found on Github and contains the SPI, a client API as well as Postgres and Microsoft SQL Server implementations.
• An in-depth talk on the topic by Ben Hale which is basically the introduction you can get.
• There's a public mailing list that summarizes the events and activities around R2DBC.
• There's the Spring Data R2DBC project that provides a good overview of how functional-reactive data access can look like.