Last week the UK IUA held a very successful and well attended User Group meeting at the University of Westiminster in London. We decided to host a two day development code sprint immediately before the user group event, and I thought you’d be interested to learn more about the results.
We had 16 participants with roughly an equal number of Ingres employees and community members drawn from the UK, US, Canada and Denmark. Companies represented included EDS, AAH Pharmaceuticals, Bording Data and Oxford University. Roy Hann, the chairman of the UK IUA, was a great source of light relief and we uncovered a hidden talent for humorous t-shirt design e.g. the t-shirt Roy is wearing in the above photo says “18 out of 20 Failed Banks Ran Oracle”
Projects Undertaken:
Compressed Backups – Jeremy Hankinson added an option to the Ingres backup utility to enable the use of bzip2 to compress the backup set as the database is backed up. The use of compression will be automatically detected when the backup set is restored.
Drupal on Ingres in the Amazon EC2 – A pre-configured Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that combines Ingres and Drupal in a ready-to-run configuration was prepared by Ray Fan and Roy Deal Simon during the sprint. The use of this AMI to deploy Ingres and Drupal, a leading open source content management system, removes the need to identify and configure all of the various components required to use this popular technology.
Enforced logging of all database activity – Alex Hanshaw added to ability to specify a list of databases in CBF for which logging cannot be disabled.
Ability to disable logging when copying or unloading a database – To speed up unloading or copying databases Paul Mason added an option to the respective utilities to provide the ability to not log activity while these actions are in progress.
Command history recall – The Ingres SQL utility for Linux and UNIX supports the command line option -history_recall to provide a command history within the terminal monitor. For some reason that wasn’t the default behavior and few people knew of it, and also it didn’t honor ctrl-c or ctrl-d. Jeremy Hankinson added the history_recall feature by default and fixed the related bugs.
bit datatype - Keith Bolam added a bit datatype to Ingres along with a set of functions that can operate on the bit type such as bit_set, bit_clr, bit_extract and bit_test
Specify OS commands from the Terminal Monitor - Geraint Jones added the ability to specify an operating system command to be executed from within the Ingres SQL Terminal Monitor. In a somewhat related project Chris Hane added the ability to create a database from within the Ingres SQL terminal monitor.
Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex routine – A soundex routine is used to index data based on how it sounds as opposed to how its spelt so that if you’ve no idea of exactly how to spell something, like a name, you can still search for it. For example the names Smith and Smyth would not appear next to each other in a phone directory, but if they were indexed based on how they sounded they’d be next to each other. The original Ingres soundex routine encodes the string as a four character value and if two names sound the same they should have the same encoding. The problem is that the four character encoding is too limiting and can result in false positives e.g. Nichols and Nicholson which don’t sound the same have the same soundex value. The new Daitch-Mokotoff soundex routine which was implemented by Marty Bowes at the sprint encodes it as a series of six digit elements which is far more reliable and accurate.
Display the query plan for a running query - Karl added the ability to display the query execution plan for a running session from the Ingres iimonitor utility. A future refinement will see this feature added to IPM also.
The above was intended to give you a feel for the activities we undertook. There were a number of other projects discussed or started and you should see those pop up on the community site in the future.
Top Ingres Community Contributor
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- Roger Burkhardt and Rick Van der Lans
The UK IUA has established an award for an outstanding community contributor and this year’s award was presented to Rick Van der Lans who has recently published a book titled The SQL Guide to Ingres. Rick was available over lunch to sign copies of the book for user group meeting attendees. In full disclosure - I was involved in reviewing Rick’s book and was invited to provide the foreword for it, but I would strongly suggest that you consider adding it to your bookshelf. The community contributor award was presented by Roger Burkhardt who is the CEO at Ingres Corporation. I saw Roger pack a copy of it in his laptop bag for the flight from London to New York and I have no doubt that he now has a black-belt in Ingres SQL.
Related Links:
http://www.h-online.com/open/Ingres-code-sprint-yields-new-features–/news/113531
http://www.euroinvestor.co.uk/News/ShowNewsStory.aspx?StoryID=10491196
http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/1001210
Posted in Other
Open Source Bridge Conference
I’m in Portland today and will be speaking at The Open Source Bridge conference later this morning. I was delighted to see when browsing the agenda over breakfast that close to 30% of the speakers at this event are female, and the topics they’re talking about run the gamut from seriously technical sessions, to community and business development. The session I’ll be delivering later today relates to my last blog topic - leveraging open source to enable innovation in this tough economy.
This morning’s first keynote speaker is the Mayor of Portland, Sam Adams. Mayor Adams is talking about the challenges he has faced in implementing open source in city government. He also stated his aspirations to “out-open-source” his counterpart in Vancouver, BC, who has stated goals around the use of open source in city government. The second keynote of the morning is being delivered by Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki, and he is talking about agile software development which is a topic I find fascinating given the dysfunctional nature of software development.
I always find that the excitement at open source community events is contagious and this is evidenced by the fact that there’s a hacker lounge open 24 hours a day at the conference hotel. I stopped by in the wee hours of this morning and was amazed to see how much work and networking was taking place. This is the inaugural Open Source Bridge Conference and its an event that I’ll definitely plan to attend next year.
Posted in Other
Earlier today we announced the availability of the Ingres Development Stack for JBoss. This stack is one of the products we defined as part of our “New Economics of IT” strategy. The stack bundles together Ingres and JBoss Developer Studio, and includes treats like JBoss Seam which is a GUI version of QBF but on steroids. David Turner from our Luminary division built a JBoss Seam version of the Ingres Frequent Flyer demo, which looks fantastic, and is written in such a way that you’ll be easily able to follow what David has done and could even use it as a tutorial before building your own applications. Enrico Schenck from our Emerging Technologies Team did a really tremendous job of papering over the seams between the technologies and supplying everything you need to quickly get started. Rico was also responsible for developing the Ingres Database Workbench which is also included in the bundle. As with all products developed at Ingres there’s a huge team involved in their delivery, but I thought that the outstanding work that David and Rico did was worth highlighting.
Our New Economics of IT message stresses the importance of embracing open standards. This bundle enables developers to do exactly that on a set of proven technologies that we know can scale from the developers desktop to the enterprise data center. Writing portable, standards based applications has many benefits including being able to deploy the application on the most suitable technology stack from a price or performance perspective. Avoiding vendor lock-in on the technology side has the added benefit of putting the budget holder in a stronger position when it comes to negotiating with technology vendors.
It is my firm belief that companies that encourage innovation during a difficult climate will emerge from this economic downturn in a stronger position than their competitors who bury their heads in the sand and hope to get through it unscathed. Open source technology providers, like Ingres and Red Hat, who enable and encourage this innovation will be the trusted partners that these companies will look to in the future. They will take the place of proprietary vendors who not only encourage technology lock-in they have in some cases exploited this position by raising prices in a climate when many are struggling to keep the lights on.
Posted in Other
I first started using Ingres 20 years ago next month and over the years have built a collection of well-thumbed Ingres books. It has been almost 15 years since a new title dedicated to Ingres has been added to my collection. It’s hard to live up to expectations that have gestated for so long, but a recently released bookabout Ingres authored by Rick van der Lans, a world renowned database expert, managed to not just meet those expectations but to far exceed them. You can preview and order the book on-line at:http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-sql-guide-to-ingres/6608333
Rick invited me to write the foreword to the book, and I was honored to be considered for this task. Below is a snippet taken from that foreword
“After two decades working as an Ingres user and as a member of the Ingres engineering team, I believe myself to be an expert on the technology inside and out, but in reviewing this book even this old dog learned a few new tricks. Rick’s broad and extensive knowledge of relational database technologies affords him the ability to provide a fresh perspective to topics that those of us who have been singularly focused on Ingres perhaps take for granted.
It is easy to write SQL, and even easier to write it poorly. This book provides the reader with an understanding of the SQL language and of the Ingres technology that will enable them to avoid common mistakes and to write efficient and well-performing SQL.
This book will serve as an educational tool to novice Ingres users as well as to those who have worked with many generations of the technology. The book contains numerous meaningful examples and hands-on exercises that clearly illustrate the preceding topics and aid the reader’s comprehension.
I was honored and delighted to be asked to provide the foreword for this book, and I hope that you will find the book to be as insightful and as educational as I did.”
Posted in Other
Earlier this year the BBC reported that Sun co-founder Scott McNealy had been asked by the Obama Administration to prepare a paper on open source. In an interview with the BBC McNealy said that he wanted to ensure the government does not get “locked in” to one specific vendor or company and is quoted in saying “The government ought to mandate open source products based on open source reference implementations to improve security, get higher quality software, lower costs, higher reliability - all the benefits that come with open software.” Given the recent announcement of Oracle’s intent to acquire Sun I wondered how a meeting between President Obama and McNealy might play out. Scott is known for delivering somewhat amusing top ten lists to get his point across, so I’ve taken the liberty of creating one for him.
Top 10 Ways the Oracle Acquisition of Sun Helps Government
10.Replacing free MySQL database servers with Oracle Standard Edition at $47.5k per CPU will definitely start money moving in the economy.
9. One of the failing banks could be salvaged to specialize in funding Oracle purchases.
8. Oracle can teach the government a thing or two about raising taxes when people are least receptive to it. Just last year when CIOs were crying that they didn’t have any money the Oracle Tax was raised by 15-20%.
7. With the margins Oracle plans to make on Sun hardware we can afford to package future products in a Cadillac Escalade and alleviate the automotive crisis while still making a profit.
6. Allowing a handful of technology companies to consolidate the technology industry in the same way that the auto makers did the US automotive industry should be just as effective.
5. Even the Republicans agree that Linux and MySQL are unAmerican.
4. Bidding for government contracts can now be streamlined to consider only those vendors that can provide the complete solution from the hardware and storage up to the user interfaces.
3. The fact that 18 out of 20 failed banks ran on Oracle is purely coincidental.
2. Java will move from an “open source” to an “open wallet” model and given its pervasiveness will get everyone spending again.
1. Forget waterboarding; the Oracle sales team have torture techniques that are far more effective and a lot less controversial.
I would love to hear from you if you have something to add.
Posted in Database, Open Source Value Prop, Other, Sun
I’ve mentioned in the past that I am a big fan of what MySQL has achieved, and how they were a proof point for us when we decided to contribute Ingres to open source.
I was just reading a rather discouraging article in The Register about a couple of Oracle Execs trotting over to Sun for a townhall meeting with the Sun employees as is standard practice during acquisitions. As a somewhat impartial observer even I was depressed by the tone of the conversation around MySQL Couldn’t Chuck have put some lipstick on the pig, or does he believe that its got swine flu?
I was amused to receive a reminder over the weekend for the on-again-off-again Oracle Vs MySQL TCO webcast. I’ve decided to tune in anyway and see how they handle it.
Posted in Community, Database, Sun
I was disappointed to recieve an email from Oracle, just moments ago, announcing the cancellation of their MySQL bashing webcast next week as it had promised to be the hightlight of my week. Ever the optimist I’m happy to see that Oracle is at least watching what we’re up to at Ingres and acting on the contents of my blog 
Tune in early next week for a fun new blog pertaining to Scott McNealy and President Obama.
Posted in Database, Open Source Value Prop, Sun
