The MySQL conference is currently underway in Santa Clara and I’ve been watching the newswire and blogs for announcements and feedback. Yesterday I read in Jeremy Cole’s blog that Sun is holding back some vital features from the MySQL open source community, and providing those features only to their enterprise customers. Marten Mikos confirmed this and attempted to justify it in a comment posted on the blog. Regular readers of my blog will remember that in December I commented on the serious mistakes being made by Sun in open source, and this is another one that I’d add to that list. To be a little bit closed source is like being a “a little bit pregnant”. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re presently hosting the first ever Ingres Global Partner Summit in Prague and we have over 60 partners in attendance. Some of the partners who are in attendance have been Ingres partners for as long as I can remember and some, like SpagoBI, are recent additions to our partner portfolio and its been exciting to listen to our partners, new and old, share their successes.

I’ve always wanted to visit Prague so I decided to take advantage of the fact that I was coming to Europe for the partner summit to spend some time sightseeing. On Sunday I set out on a 4 hour tour of the city and was amazed at the parallels that could be drawn between this beautiful city and Ingres. Read the rest of this entry »

Well actually I don’t! After years of feeling uncomfortable on a dance floor, I decided to go to the Arthur Murray Dance School for one-on-one dance tuition. Things didn’t go too well in my initial evaluation, and after an hour the instructor informed me that it was impossible to teach me to dance, I had no sense of rhythm and she was going to give me a complete refund of my money. It was the first time the instructor had ever had to admit defeat and I think we were equally disappointed. I can’t imagine an Ingres instructor ever telling a client that they could never be taught to be an Ingres DBA, but I could be wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

It was St Patrick’s Day last Monday, and I started the day feeling a little blue rather than green. I was to have spent the weekend in Dublin with my family, but instead found myself at an Eclipse Foundation board meeting in Santa Clara. I’ve recently been elected to the board of the Eclipse Foundation to represent the add-in provider community which includes Ingres and our friends at Laszlo and Red Hat. It was an insightful meeting and getting the opportunity to meet 1200 Eclipse Developers meant that EclipseCon was definitely worth sacrificing my planned St Patrick’s Day in Dublin. Read the rest of this entry »

In the early days of Ingres Corp, the AR-PR team did an exercise with the executive team to understand how they viewed Ingres. One of the questions they asked was “If Ingres was a car what car would it be?” I’m not really a car person, so I answered “C Class Mercedes Benz”. Now the fact that I drive a C Class Benz with a license plate that reads “INGRES” probably had something to do with my answer, but I was able to back up my response. My car provides great value for the money, is very well equipped, incredibly reliable, and handles anything that’s thrown at it with ease. It is backed up by an amazing team, and has roots in Europe and in the US. There are obviously cars out there that can go from 0-60 faster and can achieve greater speeds, but Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret that I have a 400 a day email habit and need a fix for my Blackberry Addiction approximately every six seconds. In fact it has gotten so bad that my friends and family have performed interventions and confiscated the device, but even without it on my hip, I can feel it vibrate in much the same way an amputee feels an itch in a missing limb.

Yesterday I encountered a problem with my device when the Blackberry Messenger icon wouldn’t respond. Read the rest of this entry »

I grew up in Ireland, a land of saints and scholars, where we’re uniquely blessed with an expansive and colorful vocabulary. My father banned only one word from the family home, that word was “cheap”. We learned an understanding and appreciation for ”value” from an early age, and in fact we conducted “TCO” studies long before we understood that term. “Cheap”, we learned, was a waste of hard earned money, “inexpensive”, on the other hand, could often be a part of a good value proposition.

This year I’ve resolved to get fit and decided to buy a treadmill so that I could combine my love of junk TV with exercise.

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