The headline above could fit in a tweet, but Drizzle making its first release almost 3 years after the project started deserves a blog post.

Brian Aker has a long blog post looking back at these 3 years (and even longer into MySQL history). Stewart Smith has an entertaining personal perspective. .frm files, I will not miss you (if I were to start using Drizzle, that is). Planet Drizzle has an avalanche of posts from most Drizzle devs celebrating this event.

A few months ago I commented on how I see Drizzle. "I" being a person very much in the MySQL ecosystem, but very little with Drizzle, it was the view of a curious outsider.

I've never said it out loud before, but my biggest doubts about Drizzle was always whether it would ever see this day. Let's face it, the team is a bunch of innovative guys, but some of them have certainly started more projects than they have finished. (Otoh, it would be difficult to do the opposite!) And the scope of their refactoring efforts have been rather heroic - most software projects with such ambition and starting from a legacy code base simply would not have managed it. So once again, congratulations Team Drizzle, this is a great achievement!

With Drizzle now out with a GA release, the other things I listed as question marks might also be resolved soon. I already see people on IRC and Facebook rushing to test it out. So I look forward to reading blog posts about those experiences, benchmarks, etc... I might even find an excuse to sneak in Drizzle into a comparative benchmark myself at the office! I hope Andrew Hutchings will blog about using Drizzle with Wordpress.

And it will be interesting to see the first company offering commercial Drizzle support! (Is anyone taking bets?)

My personal focus with all things MySQL has always been to unleash and leverage the community. This is the part Drizzle did right from the start. At the same time, I and many others have chosen a complementary approach and not actually been part of that great community: we had to remain with the MySQL+variants code base that is actually used out there in the real world, the forks that had GA releases that people can use, and we've tried to make the best out of that. And it's been ok - MySQL and InnoDB are much faster now too, we too compile without warnings... But of all the forks, Drizzle still has the best open source community. Together with a GA release, that is a considerable advantage.

It will be interesting to see Drizzle pick up momentum as we go forward. I will be even more curious than I was last year.