It's the time of the year where we are nearing Calcite's graduation
(birthday) on October 22! It's been a really busy year for Calcite and
we've added quite a few committers to the project with a total of 44
committers on the project.
We have seen 3 releases so far for Calcite this year, with each release
containing a significant amount of changes. More importantly, I think we
maintained a more steady and predictable release cadence for Calcite
this year. The project has also seen a big improvement in terms of
reviewing pull requests as well as increased participation on our
mailing lists. I think there is still work to be done in this area, but
the efforts we have made to address this this year should be highly
commended.
In terms of Avatica, we had 2 releases for Avatica itself and 1 release
for Avatica Go. Compared to Calcite, Avatica does not seem to be as
active in terms of contributors and reviews for pull requests. In the
last board report, a board member mentioned that Avatica was not very
discoverable [1]. I hope to see more active participation in Avatica in
terms of contributing code and reviewing pull requests in the coming
year and I would love to hear your thoughts on making Avatica more
discoverable.
The project also saw members of the Calcite, Flink and Beam teams
present a paper on the use of Calcite for streaming-SQL applications at
SIGMOD 2019. At ApacheCon NA in September, there were 5 talks on
Calcite. Props to those who presented talks and I'd love to see more
talks at future ApacheCons and events.
In terms of the community, we have seen a lot of new contributors and
participants on the list. I hardly see any question go unanswered and
it's very reassuring to see queries being answered so quickly. I think
our welcoming community and responsiveness is definitely a huge plus for us.
It's been a massive privilege to be able to serve as Calcite's PMC chair
in 2019. It's also been a big learning experience for me and I am really
lucky to be able to ask Julian and Michael for pointers when some of the
ASF's processes weren't clearly documented. I am also extremely proud of
having the opportunity to work with contributors who have shown great
care and craftsmanship to the code they are working on, focusing on
making sure code that makes it into the repository is well-thought-out
and supple.
When Calcite graduated to a top level project in 2015, we agreed to
rotate the PMC chair every 12 months. I want to use this as an
opportunity to start some discussion about a new chair. I believe
Stamatis Zampetakis is a good choice, if he is willing to accept.
Stamatis has been a great contributor to the project. He has shown a lot
of care and thought to the quality and state of the code and I feel
these attributes would make him a great PMC chair.
To repeat 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!
Francis
[1]
https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/f9cdf702507d3a55204d7f844b7eb6906bc4fe8cb373e3e2822e3ade@%3Cdev.calcite.apache.org%3E
