Last Week in Drizzle

Welcome to the latest edition of Last Week in Drizzle.  This week we announced our GA release!!  Interest in Drizzle in the last week has been much higher than anticipated, this blog alone got 4,500 visitors on Wednesday! (which was also a nice test for the Drizzle database powering it)

GA Release

So, on Tuesday the tarball was cut for our GA release called Drizzle7.  Most of the changes from the last week relate to code cleanup, documentation and test suite improvements so that we could keep the codebase stable ready for the release (also many of us are busy writing conference talks around now :) ).  For a quick summary of what to expect in Drizzle7 and the future you can see my three-part special called "Drizzle - The Icing on the Cake": part 1 part 2 part 3

There have also been blog posts from several members of the Drizzle team: Brian Aker, Patrick Crews, Stewart Smith and more can be found on Planet Drizzle

Drizzle in the Media

We have had huge coverage by many technology publications which has been fantastic to read, I'll try to link to some of them here but you should be able to find more by searching Google News:

• The H: Cloud and web database Drizzle reaches general availability


• The Register: Drizzle: Big-Data-happy MySQL fork debuts (some technical inaccuracies in this, HailDB isn't the default engine, InnoDB is, but still great to see The Register covering us)


• InternetNews.com: Open Source Drizzle database now GA - Should Oracle worry?


• InfoWorld: Non-Oracle MySQL fork deemed ready for prime time


• NetworkWorld: Is the 'database for the cloud' ready? Drizzle GA released


• ZDNet: MySQL fork Drizzle gets general release


• Rackspace Cloud Blog: Drizzle7: The First GA release of the Drizzle Project (OK, I wrote that one ;) )

There has also been a lot of coverage in foreign media which is also fantastic to see.

Drizzle Downloads

The only metric we have for the amount of downloads for Drizzle is the source downloads.  We can't record the usage of the Ubuntu PPA or the installations using the pre-release of Ubuntu Natty (which has Drizzle in it's repositories) and currently don't log the RPM yum repository.  But on source downloads alone there were more downloads in the first 2 days of GA than the 2 weeks of the RC2 release (I count a shade under 400 downloads at the time of publishing this).  On top of this many more people have come to the #drizzle IRC channel on Freenode to ask us questions and even one or two minor bugs have already been found by new users.

Criticisms

The biggest criticism I have seen so far is the name 'Drizzle' for a database.  I personally like the name 'Drizzle', but I come from the UK where Drizzle is a very regular weather condition.  I actually think that is a really good thing, if the only big complaint is the name we most be going right somewhere :)

Fremont

Development has already started on the next version of Drizzle codename Fremont (Drizzle7's codename was Elliott).  This time we aim to make you wait a little less time, with the next GA scheduled for later this year.  For those who haven't guessed it already the codenames for Drizzle are based on road names in Seattle (another place where drizzle regularly happens).  It hasn't yet been decided whether this will be Drizzle7.1 or Drizzle8 and I'm sure we would take suggestions on this at the upcoming Drizzle Developer Day.

Final Thoughts

The overall feedback from the last week has been fantastic.  I'd like to thank everyone who has given us great coverage, everyone who has tried Drizzle and last but not least everyone who develops Drizzle whether it be at Rackspace, another company or just a community developer.

As always if you have any feedback or topics you would like me to cover, please let me know.