Continuent has released a new major version of the Sequoia database clustering software (formerly known as C-JDBC). This new version adds ODBC connectivity for non-Java application. MySQL users will enjoy the support of the MySQL native API that allows any MySQL driver (PHP, Perl, ...) to be used with Sequoia.

Many robustness improvements, JDBC 3 extensions and a new documentation are also part of this release. Check the complete release notes for more details.

This new release has been tested with the Hibernate test suite and should please all database users. Don't hesitate to share your feedback with the community.

I've not been looking at this for quite some time, i.e. the last time I took a look this was still called CJDBC. Back then the biggest letdown was that it simply didn't work. The specifications and papers sounded wonderful, but in practice it just didn't do what it should do.

So, my biggest question is, does it actually work now? Are any people using this in production? If one would compare Sequoia's version number with a more traditional numbering scheme, would this be like a 0.8 version or closer to a 1.0?

I really don't mean to sound too negative btw, just wondering. I absolutely would like to use Sequoia to add robustness and failover to my DB (PG 8.1) but I'm really afraid that any unstable middleware would make my situation possible less stable instead of more.

Sequoia is now the base of commercial products (check p/cluster on www.continuent.com for a PostgreSQL specific product). There has been an extensive QA effort made (check the change log) and now each release goes through more than 10K tests.
The documentation is slightly improving with new parts of the product documentation being contributed to the open source. But there are still some features specific to the open source that are not fully documented.
We do have production users based on Sequoia core version 2.7 or later. Note that Sequoia itself remains database neutral and pure ANSI SQL. If you need database specific features, you will have to look at the commercial products.