Sun Drizzle project

I've been intermittently following the progress of the Drizzle project, which is an offshoot of MySQL. You can read about some of the early goals of the Drizzle work on Brian Aker's weblog:

Adopt external libraries, use open source mechanics for contributions, keep to an open style of communication, and remove the line between internal and external development.

Several of the Drizzle engineers have been posting a lot this month, talking about where they see Drizzle going and what they mean by "a database for the Cloud".

There's definitely some very interesting work being done by these folks; it will be interesting to keep an eye on it and see if they can actually build a community around their ideas.