Last year I had the opportunity to meet Rick van der Lans. He specializes in lecturing and writing books about databases, data warehousing, and BI topics. He’s quite an individual and has been a great resource over the year to help guide some of our work particularly in the BI space and future database work. After talking with several of us here at Ingres, Rick decided to put pen to paper or rather fingers to the keyboard and has just completed his new book, The SQL Guide to Ingres. At 700+ pages, it’s sure to answer all your Ingres SQL questions. Rick was joined by a number of individuals here at Ingres who helped with the editing of the book and includes a forward by Emma McGrattan.

If you happen to be in London on Tuesday, June 9, stop by for the UK IUA event where Rick will be talking about his new book on Ingres and connect with other Ingres users as well as hear what is going on at Ingres up close.

/deb

I can’t tell you the number of times I hear people say they want to know how a particular product is performing, how sales numbers are coming together or trouble tickets match up to various products. You can typically find out this type information if YOU have ACCESS to the right data sources within your company. How many times have you been told – I can run that report for you but can’t give you access? Either you’re not allowed to have access to all the information or the cost of individual licenses to the various BI tools are prohibited for all employees.

We at Ingres released an update to the Ingres Icebreaker BI Appliance this week. Not only did we update the Ingres database, an updated version of Jaspersoft, we include a reporting appliance. What is a reporting appliance you may ask? It allows you to connect to salesforce, download a local copy of your salesforce data and can now run reports locally against the data and also against other data marts you have stored locally.  We use this feature here at Ingres to track product performance against product revenue and incoming leads. It’s a great feature that has been added and now we can offer access to this information to a broader group of individuals without having individual licenses to salesforce.com. Another cool feature is we can restrict access to certain components of data to various individuals.

In today’s business climate, providing employees with the right tools to do their job is critical. Why not provide them with cost effective, easy to use tools as well? Check out the new Ingres Icebreaker BI Appliance. Where else can you get a full suite of BI tools (Jaspersoft), business critical database (Ingres) and the linux operating system in a single install with integrated maintainence?

/deb woods

Progress in office technologies stopped and it has occurred because user, capable to write primitive programs, cannot:

• display 3-dimensional data in window of own program
• move 3-dimensional objects by commands in a foreign program (in such as ‘Microsoft Office’), and see changes on display

Objects can be drawn by mouse independently, downloaded from internet, obtained as a result of calculations, or as output from hardware. In any case, there is a need for:

• binary format for file, which contains 3D-objects, moreover objects must be written as triangles (which are understandable for users) instead of languages 3DMLW, 3DXML, COLLADA, because user does not master formulating and considering of own problems on these languages
• engine inside operating system, which:
  1. allows to load into self these binary files
  2. return objects in format X11 [1] at request of them, that program, addressed to this engine, could send obtained data to the X-server without any own calculations or changes (without referencing to OpenGL, DirectX, which user never will masters!)
  3. supplies two ways to change the coordinates of objects (both ways create commands in format X11 to control X-Server, which are immediately forwarded to the X-server):
     • by query language (that allow a program to change coordinates)
     • accepting events in format X11 [1], which are also commands to change coordinates, but are send by mouse (that allows to change coordinates by mouse)

It will be enough for user to call one function, we shall name it as ‘printg’, in which user specify what 3D-objects from database engine must appear on a screen (this function being called, automatically forwards all mouse motion commands of objects and motion of camera into engine; all messages about motion of objects, obtained from engine, automatically forwarded into X-server). It will be enough to call another function, we shall name it as ‘request’, to send order to change coordinates on query language (change immediately is displayed on screen, because messages from engine are automatically forwarded to X-server after call of ‘printg’). And these two functions can be called in any program. This is breakthrough in office technology. (more…)

The latest release of the DbLinq project now comes with official support for the Ingres database! For those of you that are not familiar with it, Linq is an O/R (Object-Relational) mapping tool with some similarities to Hibernate. Linq is type-safe, queries get compiled into MSIL on the fly, and your C# WHERE clauses are translated into SQL and sent to the DBMS server for execution. In short, it makes design of data access layers safer and faster. In C# 3.0, linq code looks like this:

var q = from p in db.Products
where p.ProductName == “Pen”
select p.ProductID;

The cool thing is, that you get full Intellisense support, so it is virtually impossible to spell anything wrong. What you also get is the ability to refactor an existing database into a Linq mapping class or a *.dbml file. So to get started with Linq on Ingres, just take the following easy steps:

1. Have Visual Studio 2008 (the free Express Edition suffices)
2. Download and compile DbLinq version 0.17
3. Generate a mapping file from your existing Ingres database using the Visual Metal tool
4. Start a new project in Visual Studio, add the mapping file and references to DbLinq.dll, DbLinq.Ingres.dll and Ingres.Client.dll
5. Enjoy!

(more…)