It has been a bit over two years since Calcite graduated to a top-level Apache project [1]. Back then, it was decided that every year there would be a "state of the project" discussion and a new PMC chair/VP would be chosen [2]. The time has come :)
The adoption of Calcite has continued growing nicely during the last year. We continued improving the support to query all data, from semi-structured to streaming, including spatial/geographical/geometry data recently. Calcite can interact with more systems than ever before and we count already more than 12 different adapters into our codebase. In turn, the wide adoption of Calcite is helping us to consolidate existing core code and extend the tests coverage. The dissemination of the project continued over the last year, with important presence of Calcite in talks at conferences and meetups. In addition, some members of the community are trying (for the second time :) ) to produce a paper describing the project, its architecture, and how other different systems are using it [3]. There were several discussions last year about the difficulty to consume Calcite documentation; we hope that this document would serve as an initial formal reference for the project. We also continued with a regular release cadence, which is representative of the health of the project as well as useful for the rest of the projects that consume the Calcite bits. Last week, CALCITE-2027 [4] was logged to drop support for Java7. I think it is a great opportunity for the project to take another step forward, releasing Calcite 2.0 shortly after that, and deprecating some old APIs along the way. We have a larger, more diverse number of committers and contributors than last year, coming both from industry and academia. Their contributions were not limited to code for the project, as we had different members of the community playing the release manager role, spending time improving the documentation of the project, etc. Probably we still need to improve some aspects as a community. For instance, recently there were discussions about the participation of the community members in one of the important tasks for the project: pull requests reviews. This continuous engagement seems to be challenging for a project such as Calcite, as most of us work primarily on other projects that "consume" Calcite and we might spend more time involved in those projects. While this is difficult to change and I do not have any specific idea to improve it, it is important that we do our best to help and ensure that the project development does not stall. I am not involved in the Avatica effort, but it has been great to see Avatica continue maturing, moving into its own repository and following with its own release cadence. Josh, Julian, if you want to add a few lines about the state of Avatica, that would be great. Since we agreed to rotate the PMC chair every 12 months, I want to use this thread to start talking about a replacement too. It has been a privilege to be able to serve as Calcite PMC chair during last year, I wish I could have found more time to foster the project further: I truly believe in Calcite vision and its value at the core of the development of open source data management systems and applications. Which candidates would like to step up? In my opinion, I think Michael Mior, if he is willing to accept, would be a great candidate. He has been engaged with the Calcite community in different roles, writing code and documentation, reviewing PRs, answering questions in the mailing lists, and acting as release manager for 1.14, among others. Lastly, as Julian asked last year: 1) What else are we doing well in the project? 2) What are the areas where we need to do better? Please take some time to share your thoughts about the state of the project. -Jesús [1] http://calcite.apache.org/news/2015/10/22/calcite-graduates/ [2] http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-calcite-dev/201509.mbox/%3CCF8D6F96-706F-4502-B41D-0689E357209D%40apache.org%3E [3] http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CALCITE-2024 [4] http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CALCITE-2027
