The Drizzle project seems to be moving along at a good clip. The effort started out as a push by MySQL co-father Brian Aker to remake the entire open source database from the ground up. Mostly. Drizzle rips out a lot of MySQL's code in favor of a faster, simpler model aimed at scalability and concurrency.
According to Aker, the project now has just over 90 contributors, and only half of them ever worked on MySQL. That's impressive because Drizzle isn't just based on MySQL, it's a full-on fork. What's also impressive about this effort to create the future of cloudy databases is the fact that so many high profile companies are now contributing to the project. Google, Rackspace and Opscode all contribute back to the project. Drizzle is certainly an open source project to keep an eye on.