Hello Calcite community, Calcite reaches its 10th anniversary! Around ten years ago (22 October 2015) Calcite graduated as a top-level Apache project [1]. At that point, the community decided to have an annual " state of the project" discussion, and we arrived at that time of the year.
We have released two versions of Calcite (1.39.0 and 1.40.0) so far in 2025 [2], with another one (1.41.0) currently under discussion, so it shall be released soon. This number is on track compared to previous years (2 in 2024, 4 in 2023, 3 in 2022). We have accomplished a great amount of work this year. It is worth highlighting new features like supporting the VARIANT and UUID data types, checked arithmetic, a new join enumeration algorithm based on dynamic programming (DPhyp), new optimization rules and dialects. Regarding the sub-project Avatica, we have had two releases of Avatica (1.26.0 and 1.27.0); and one release of Avatica Go (5.4.0) [3]. Although this may not seem much, it is actually a lot of activity compared to the previous year (only one Avatica release and no Avatica Go releases in 2024). Thus, even though it moves more slowly compared to Calcite, Avatica is still a living project. In terms of the community, we had three new Committers so far: Cancai Cai, Fanyuan Qiu and Zhen Chen. Moreover, our PMC team has expanded with three new PMC members: Istvan Toth, Xiong Duan and Alessandro Solimando. These numbers are higher than the previous year, where we only had one new Committer and two new PMC members. Calcite grows and evolves because of (and thanks to) its community, and I would like to express my gratitude to everyone for being a part of this family and working together in a respectful and motivating environment. Many contributors have made outstanding contributions to the project this year, for which we are extremely grateful, and we hope to eventually invite them as Committers once they have accumulated sufficient merits. We had a hybrid meetup (the first one since I remember) at the beginning of the year (20 February). 40+ people attended the event in person in Santa Clara, California; with 30+ people joining remotely. Four talks were presented, describing various topics involving Calcite. This was a very interesting and enriching event for the community, and I want to thank all the participants, and especially Stamatis for organizing it. Perhaps we were lacking presentations "to the outside world", in events like Apache's Community Over Code. There is clearly room for improvement here and we all as a community should try to do our best to "promote" Calcite and spread the word about our project. In terms of PR reviewing (one of our traditional problems), I have the impression that we are moving in the right direction and the issue is not so bad compared to previous years. We have new members of the community participating in the review process, taking responsibility and helping out with this particular task, where we traditionally struggle. I would like to thank especially Mihai, who has been consistently our top reviewer in the last quarters. To conclude, I will repeat the questions from previous years: 1) What else are we doing well in the project? 2) What areas do we need to do better? Please take some time to share your thoughts! Note that this discussion is for everyone, not only for Committers / PMC members; even if you have never sent an email to the dev list before, now it is a good time to do so. Finally, it has been a privilege to serve as Calcite's PMC Chair this year. This was my second time as PMC Chair, I tried to do my best and I am very grateful for the opportunity that I was given. Following our yearly rotation tradition, I will step down as Chair by the end of the year, and a new one will have to be chosen. As we discussed some time ago [4], if you have any suggestion and you would like to put someone forward as a potential next Chair, please send an email to [email protected]. The nomination period for the new Chair will remain open for the next two weeks (until 2 November). The PMC will study all proposals, discuss, and start a vote soon afterwards. The change will be effective some time in December once the resolution is approved by the board. Best, Ruben [1] https://calcite.apache.org/news/2015/10/22/calcite-graduates/ [2] https://calcite.apache.org/news/ [3] https://calcite.apache.org/avatica/news/ [4] https://lists.apache.org/thread/gplfqs4snr1b6h62cngyvb65sz41z3fk
