We’ve released Drizzle7! Not only that, we’re now calling it Generally Available – a GA release.

What does this mean? What does this GA label mean?

You could view as a GA label being “we’re pretty confident people aren’t going to on mass ask for our heads when they start using it”… which isn’t a too bad description. We also plan to maintain it, there could be future releases in this series that just include bug fixes – we won’t just immediately tell you to go and use the latest tarball or bzr tree. This release series is a good one to use.

Drizzle7 is something that can be packaged in Linux distros. It’s no longer something where the best bet is to add the PPA and upgrade every two weeks or build from source yourself. If you’re looking to deploy Drizzle (or develop against it) – you can rely on this release.

I’ll never use the words “production ready” to describe a release – it’s never up to me. It’s up to each person or organisation looking to deploy a piece of software to decide if that bit of software is production ready for them.

Personally, I’m looking forward to see how people can break it. While Drizzle is the best tested FOSS SQL RDBMS server, I’m sure there’s new an interesting ways it can be broken by saying we’re ready for a much larger crowd to hammer on it.

Overall, I think we’ve managed to take the now defunct MySQL 6.0 tree (way back in 2008) and release something that can truly live up to the line “database for cloud”. Drizzle is modern, modular, rather solid and understandable. The future is bright, there is so much more to do to make the ultimate database for cloud. Drizzle7 is a great platform to build on – both for us (developers) and us (people who use relational databases).