I started using Ingres very early in my career. I was developing a network management center for a small start-up and we needed a database to store historical data. We didn’t have a budget for a database so we started using Ingres because it was distributed for free with a UNIX desktop platform. I really enjoyed working with Ingres, both the technology and the people, and applied to join the “Ingres Desktop Center of Excellence” as soon as I saw that they were recruiting in Dublin back in the early 90s. We had a tight knit and hard working team in Dublin and we were really upset when CA shut the Dublin operation down in 1994. I moved to the CA/Ingres office in Chelsea, London and have very fond memories of working with the Ingres folks in Anchor House. The new Ingres Corporation is much like the old Ingres and it never ceases to amaze me how much affection for the Ingres brand survives to this day.In many of the new engagements that we participate in we come across people with Ingres in their backgrounds. The latest example was while I was in the UK last week; we had a meeting with Alfresco, the leading open source alternative for enterprise content management. John Newton, Alfresco’s founder, CTO and Chairman, was employee number eight at the original Ingres, or RTI as it was back then. It became obvious during the meeting that John has fond memories of his time at Ingres. John’s extensive Ingres knowledge and memory for when particular features were added to the DBMS engine was very impressive.

No doubt there are people out there today using Ingres for the same reasons that I did back in the 90’s. The open source development model means that, unlike me, they can become DBMS developers without joining the company.

 

  Posted in Open Source Value Prop

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 10:00 am and is filed under Open Source Value Prop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.