So this is cool. The Commerce guys and Microsoft teamed up and got a php pdo driver to work. The Commerce guys will be maintaining the Microsoft database integration module in contrib repo. It means that it becomes accessible to a much broader audience. People will be able to use native windows backup tools to backup their site databases. Deploy on a server platform they are familiar with.

This opens up Drupal to a whole new audience that previously would not explore using Drupal at all. It will be interesting to see what things people have not previously considered that this group will bring to the community.

Microsoft announcement here

While chatting in IRC the other night, I found that Adam Light and I will be on the same flight through Chicago on our way to Drupalcon. So, if anyone else is scheduled for United 534 leaving Chicago at 1:10pm leave a comment. Adam and I plan to share a cab to the hotel as they are reasonably close and Public transport in a city new to me on a Sunday night after being up 14-16 hours just doesn't seem to hold an appeal for me. I plan on wearing my BADCAMP07 Drupal shirt so should be easy to spot.

On the downside, it appears that ChipIn has been having issues for the past 16 hours and timing out when people try and donate :(. It does seem to be working now so if you are still interested in helping out my travel fund I'd appreciate it.

http://sepeck.chipin.com/travel-to-drupalcon

Overall this schedule does work nicely. My in-laws are coming up to keep my wife company while I am gone (I suspect they are here to visit with the grand kids).

This is the result of seeing one too many 'For Drupal to really succeed' posts. Drupal is already a success. There is certainly room to get better and grow more, but Drupal has already succeeded.

When listening to interviews with musicians who have a new 'hit' album/song I often get a sense that the interviewer has this fundamental assumption that the artist just started playing/singing last month. When you listen carefully, you find that the artist has been working at their craft for years. So it goes with Drupal and Drupal's success.

For the time I have been with the Drupal community we have had a steady progression of success. In my first few years, the community took pride in the fact that sites could be built by skilled developers with no indication that it was using Drupal (Yes, many hobbyists often implemented sites that were obviously Drupal). Calls to put 'tagging' into the code to more easily identify Drupal based sites were often met with resistance. The prevailing attitude was to focus on quality and capability rather then count implementations.