Hello community, A bit more than seven 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 have arrived to that time of the year.
We have had three Calcite releases so far in 2022 [2] (many thanks to each Release Manager), with probably one more coming before the end of the year. We have seen great evolutions such as new spatial functions, polymorphic table functions, Firebolt dialect, parsing parenthesized joins (kudos to Julian Hyde for dealing with this very old issue), improvements on SQL hints, and many more. Regarding the sub-project Avatica, we have seen two releases this year, and two more releases for Avatica Go [3] (special thanks to Francis Chuang for being the Release Manager for all of them). These were all basically maintenance releases. It is clear that Avatica has fewer users, contributors and evolutions than Calcite. More of them will be very welcome, although I am not sure about how we could promote it. We have also faced several vulnerabilities for both Calcite and Avatica during the last year, including the famous log4j issues, and we were able to deal with them in a swiftly and collaboratively manner. In terms of community, I think this has been a great year. Calcite continues to increase steadily its contributors. We see more and more people participating in email discussions, Jira tickets and Github PRs. Our list of committers has grown with Jing Zhang, Benchao Li, Bertil Chapuis and Dmitry Sysolyatin; and so has our PMC with Chunwei Lei, Vladimir Ozerov and Andrei Sereda. Calcite grows and evolves because of (and thanks to) its community, so I would like to thank everyone for being part of this family and working together in a respectful and motivating environment. We started the year with an online meetup, which was a great opportunity for the community to virtually meet and share some interesting presentations. Perhaps we could begin the discussions to try to organize another one in the near future (beginning of 2023?), in order to try to hold at least one every year. In a less positive aspect, it is probably worth mentioning that we continue to struggle on PR reviewing. Our pull-requests list continues to increase and frequently it is hard to have people reviewing / merging them, and this can be frustrating for non-committers. This is an old problem of our project. We have tried several things to improve it (like metrics and credit on our quarterly reports; or sporadic "reviewing campaigns", especially before a release). Any ideas on improving this situation will be highly appreciated. 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. I have learnt a lot 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 priv...@calcite.apache.org (the PMC will study all proposals, discuss and vote). Best regards, Ruben [1] http://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
