Earlier today we announced the Ingres VectorWise technology preview program which gives our partners and customers an opportunity to kick the tires on an early version of the product, while the engineering team holds it breath and hopes that the doors don’t fall off.  To be fair to the Ingres VectorWise team my emerging technologies guys have been playing with Ingres VectorWise for a couple of months now and are completely blown away by its performance and impressed with the stability of the product.

Many of us in Ingres Engineering have spent more years than we’d care to admit working with database technologies and have seen database trends, such as object-relational databases, come and go, so there was some healthy skepticism about the VectorWise project’s chance for success.  Having lived through the Jasmine project at CA we learned that bolting two pieces of database technologies together  isn’t easy and that the results aren’t always pretty.

I’ll admit that when I saw the initial project plans for Ingres VectorWise, produced by the team Amsterdam, I figured that there must have been some passive smoking going on   I was somewhat skeptical of the chances of a successful coupling between something as revolutionary and cutting edge as VectorWise and something as “mature” as Ingres – think Hugh Heffner and Holly Madison, but I’m happy to have been proven wrong!  Talking of Hugh Heffner maturity, you may be surprised to learn that Roy Hann, who we hope will be participating in the technology preview program, has recently hit a half century!

There’s lots of detailed information available on the web about the inner workings of Ingres VectorWise.  If you’re an existing Ingres customer or partner who is interested in joining the Ingres VectorWise Technology Preview Program then I’d encourage you to fill out the application that’s available here.

Ingres VectorWise is revolutionary – it’s a database, but not as you know it!

 

As we enter a new decade, I thought it might be fun to look back on some of the Ingres milestones of the last decade. 

The Great Y2K Non-event

I spent the eve of the new millennium holed up in the Computer Associates Headquarters in Islandia, New York.  We’d instituted the II_DATE_CENTURY_BOUNDARY fix for Ingres well in advance of the switchover, so we had mixed emotions as we sat in the office, as the new millennium dawned across the globe, and watched nothing happen.  

Ingres - the first database available for the AMD Opteron(x86-64)
In 2002 I met with AMD and was quickly sold on their idea of extending the x86 chip-set to enable 64-bit computing.   I really liked the fact that their approach would allow native support for existing applications – a shortcoming of the rival Intel Itanium project.  We took delivery of a stack of shiny new 64-bit desktop machines and Jeremy Hankinson took responsibility for porting Ingres to this exciting new platform.   J made short work of getting the port completed and through QA and we were delighted to be highlighted as the first GA database platform for Opteron when the Opteron chip was launched in 2003. 

Emma Learns that there is such a Thing as Bad Publicity
Let’s just say that after almost a decade the “Pornography Incident” has almost disappeared from the Internet.  Whew!

Ingres Enters Open Source
In 2004 Ingres was contributed to the open source community under the CA Trusted Open Source License.   The launch was accompanied by the now infamous Ingres Million Dollar Challenge, a partnership agreement with JBoss and the availability of Plone and Zope for Ingres. 

Ingres Corporation is Formed
Ingres Corporation was formed in November 2005 and there was tremendous excitement amongst the Ingres team that was liberated from CA.   A company had to be built almost overnight around the 100 people that left CA to form Ingres Corporation, and the company has grown significantly since then in terms of size, mind-share and market-share.

Ingres 2006 Launched
One of the first engineering tasks we undertook at Ingres Corp was to re-brand the Ingres product with the Ingres Corp branding and release it under the GPL license.  One of the problems with the CA Trusted Open Source License was that nobody trusted it – despite the fact that “Trusted” was its middle-name! 

Emma re-learns the Bad Publicity Lesson
Let’s just say that Ms. McGrattan has learned never to pick a fight with the boys when she’s outnumbered 10:1.    

Ingres IceBreaker Launched
Ingres IceBreaker was an idea ahead of its time.  The idea of a truly integrated software solution was revolutionary and we spent a lot of time explaining the benefits of a software appliance long before the term was commonly understood.  Thankfully software appliances are now more popular and we have recently been invited by Novell to integrate Ingres with SUSE Studio to enable third party appliances to benefit from the rich feature set that Ingres provides.

OpenROAD Enters Open Source
In May of 2008 we completed the work required to create an open source project, named EMPIRE, for Ingres OpenROAD.   The announcement was very well received by the OpenROAD community and since then we have held a number of successful code-sprints and seen significant  community contributions to the project.

Ingres VectorWise Project Announced
I may be biased, but I believe that the announcement of the Ingres VectorWise project is the most exciting thing to happen in the database space in the past decade.   Ingres VectorWise is the first enterprise solution that will truly exploit the improvements made in chip technology over the past decade.

There were other high points of the past decade that didn’t make my list such as meeting Michael Stonebraker at The Ingres Conference, The Ingres 30 Year Anniversary at UC Berkeley, the Ingres Open Engineering Summit in the Dominican Republic, winning awards at industry trade-shows, our placing in the Forrester Wave, Rick’s Ingres book….  

If you have your own personal favourite milestones from the past decade, I’d love to hear from you.

 

This week I had a piece titled “The Innovation Economy – the Tipping Point for Open Source” published in one of the leading Open Source publications in Russia.   My linguistic skills don’t extend to Russian, but fortunately for me I have a couple of Russians on my team and one of them, Eugene Karapetyants, very kindly translated my original document from English into Russian.  

http://www.osp.ru/os/2009/07/10466759/

I got a kick out of seeing my name written as “Эмма Макграттен” but apart from that I couldn’t make much sense of the article.    I was amused by the following translation that I received from Ketan Karia our SVP of Marketing.

“The corrupt capitalist corporations of the west, having failed to destroy our robust economy with their licencing policies are now trying to take over our companies and govmt by attempting to give it away for free! HA! Do they think we’ll fall for such an obvious con?
Comrade McGrattan argues a good case but fails to notice that with more billionaires per capita than in the US we can finally afford to pay Oracle and microsoft!
Next ELA invoice please!”

Ketan has a great sense of humor, but it’s not often that he makes me laugh out loud, so I thought I’d share.

 

…is reminiscent of what happens in the proprietary software industry!

I’ve just returned from a trip to Vegas and, while it was supposed to be a vacation, I couldn’t help but think of the many parallels that can be drawn between Vegas and the proprietary software industry.  It started when a friend marvelled at how the casino was providing her with  “free” drinks, as she pumped $20 after $20 into a one-armed-bandit;  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spoken to people who believe that they’re getting “free” Oracle licenses.    Then there were the Vegas weddings which can cost you a whole heck of a lot more to get out of than to get into.  I’m not going to even start on the parallels between the hookers and software sales people, but I’m sure you can use your imagination (and don’t be shy if you want to share those as comments below)…and last but not least  the house always wins!

 

At a recent NoSQL event in San Francisco Michael Stonebraker predicted the end of the RDBMS.   I haven’t been keeping track of just how many times he’s made this particular prediction but I suspect that if I had been counting I’d have run out of fingers, and moved onto toes, by now.   No doubt he’ll eventually be proven right, but I suspect that the RDBMS will outlive even the mainframe; another technology whose demise has been predicted for decades.  

There are obviously situations in which column stores will out-perform row stores and we believe that Ingres Vectorwise is going to kick some serious butt in that space.   Speaking of Ingres Vectorwise, we’re very excited to be a part of the Intel Developer Forum next week.  In fact Intel is almost as excited as we are about it because Ingres Vectorwise is a great proofpoint that business applications can in fact track Moore’s Law.   I suspect you’ll see a lot of press and blog activity around it. 

So now back to the title of the blog.  It was inspired by Anna Lui, the keynote speaker at the Australian Architecture Forum, who as part of her keynote talked about how the ACID properties of traditional databases are irrelevant for a class of web based applications.  They work off a principle called “eventual consistency”.    I’d never claim to be a database purist, but I was amused by the notion when she first mentioned it, but since then have seen how a trade off between consistency and availability could be required by global scale web applications.   I imagine however that this concept of “eventual consistency” could cause hiccups in social media applications if everyone’s view of the world is slightly different or events happen in varying order.   I’ll keep on eye on that for now.

 

For someone who never stops talking I’ve been remarkably quite on the blogging front of late.  That’s about to change!

I’ve recently returned from my first ever trip to Australia and I have to tell you I can’t wait to return next year.  My punishment for never having visited Australia, in all the time I’ve been with Ingres, was a grueling schedule with just half a day allocated for sightseeing, and another half a day allocated for drinking  team-building with Jason Leonidas’ Melbourne based team.   John Ryan, our ANZ marketing wiz-kid and marathon-runner-extraordinaire, was assigned tour guide duty on my first day, a beautiful sunny Sunday, in Sydney.  We made our way to Circular Quay via the Botanic Gardens and the Sydney Opera House to take a ferry to Manly for some barramundi and beer.  There were some souvenir shops by the ferry terminal and I was completely taken by a novelty item which was a bottle opener made from a kangaroo scrotum.   What can I say! I hadn’t slept in days and it seemed like a good idea at the time!

 The following morning (again I’ll blame the jet-lag and lack of sleep) I took up a friend’s challenge to work the souvenir into my presentation at the Sydney Australian Architecture Forum.   I knew that when talking about how propietray vendors have their customers by balls that working that souvenir into the pitch wouldn’t be hard and would break the ice with the audience.  It certainly did the trick!   The “Breaking Architectural Lock-In” presentation was one of the most popular presentations at the event.  

Other Ingres sessions at the event included an open discussion on  cloud deployment which I led.  It seems that everyone wants to understand what all the hype is about, but very few are ready to deploy enterprise solutions in the cloud today.   Marc Titmuss provided an overview and demonstration of Ingres Vectorwise which was really compelling and while it didn’t draw a huge crowd the people that were in attendance definitely got it, and got very excited about the opportunities that Ingres Vectorwise will open up. To wrap up the day I particpated in a panel discussion along with folks from Red Hat, Microsoft, Oracle and Object Consulting .  We took questions from the floor and each provided our unique perspective on the issue.   I was impressed with how far along the Australian governement appears to be in pushing a green agenda and I plan to work with John Ryan on a blog specifically on that topic since I know its one that he cares about deeply.  

 Two days later we got to repeat the whole thing again at the Melbourne Australian Architecture Forum.   The primary difference between the two events was that we had an Ingres customer, Adrian Hamilton, CIO of Peerless Foods, share his success with Ingres and OpenROAD at the Melbourne event.   Adrian’s story is quite compelling and the live demonstration of this technology is really very impressive.  Adrian is a sharp and articulate CIO with a passion for technology who has built an architecure on Ingres and OpenROAD that enables the automation of every aspect of the company’s business processes from forecasting and ordering, to production, packaging, and distribution.   We realeased a success story with more details of the cost savings achieved by Adrian and his team earlier today and you can find that at the following link. For those of you who will be attending the OpenROAD Code Sprint in the UK later this month, Paul White has promised to try to secure permission and equipment to repeat the demonstration at that event, and I suspect you’ll be as impressed by it as I was.

There’s a lot happening in the open source space in Australia and I’ll be blogging about other aspects of my trip in future entries.