From the 'even now people are hiring' files:

Though Sun recently shed thousands of jobs, it's actually now hiring - well for at least one key position. Sun is looking for a Software Senior Staff Engineer to work on the MySQL open source Drizzle project.

Drizzle is an effort launched last July to create a more slimmed down version of MySQL. At first it looked like just a pet project of developer Brian Acker, but now with a new staffing position opening up for it, I suspect that Drizzle is getting a lot more serious.

There are also some keys in the job posting about where Drizzle is headed. The job posting notes that the job entails working on a next generation database to deliver as a service for cloud computing.

If you've got six plus years of experience with C, C++, PHP and Perl, a strong background in web services and database technologies,application development, testing and benchmarking , Solaris and Linux experience - well this might be a great opportunity for you. The full job posting is linked here.