You may have seen news reports last week about a trend that’s caught alight on Facebook where people post 25 random facts about themselves. I thought it might be fun to do something similar for Ingres, so here goes:

1. While the official line is that the acronym INGRES stands for INteractive Graphic REtrieval System, legend has it that the project was actually named for Eugene Wong’s favorite artist.
2. The longest source file in Ingres, in terms of lines of code, is pslsgram.yi which has 56483 lines.
3. The longest serving member of Ingres staff is John Smedley who has been with us since June of 1987.
4. Ingres is most commonly misspelled “Ingress”, but it amuses us when the word “ingress”, meaning entrance, is mistakenly typed “ingres”. J pointed out a great example taken from Farmer’s Weekly Interactive which states “Immigration of badgers from the edge of culled areas can cause problems with ingres”.
5. It was ASK, not CA, who named the OpenIngres release and reset the product release number from 6.x to 1.x.
6. Ingres revenue in 2008 was ~$68M. It is estimated that MySQL did $63M in the same period.
7. Ingres and the Ingres Eclipse DTP can run on a PS3.
8. The name Postgres is a contraction of “Post-Ingres”, but there is no shared code between the two projects .
9. Ingres has customers in 58 countries.
10. The most random Ingres customer success story I found on our website was the use of Ingres in one of the largest animal tracking projects in the world.
11.  The Ingres IRC channel is #ingres on irc.freenode.net
12. John Newton, Alfresco’s founder and CTO, was employee number eight at the original Ingres, or RTI as it was back then.
13. The 9.x number scheme that’s used in the latest Ingres releases honors the original product version numbering.
14. Conference rooms at the Ingres HQ in Redwood City are named after the highest mountains in the world, but were named with no regard for real geography.
15. Oracle spelled backward and fed into the Google Translate tool from Spanish to English yields the result “expensive”.  OK, that’s nothing to do with Ingres, but interesting none the less
16. The Ingres test tool SEP is an acronym for Send Expect Process and not Someone Else’s Problem as most of Ingres Engineer seem to believe.
17. Ingres supports two relational languages, QUEL and SQL.  QUEL is still used extensively within Ingres today.
18. Ingres applications can work against Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and DB2 UDB… via Enterprise Access.
19. Ingres/Star was the first product in the marketplace to provide true distributed relational database support.
20. The home grown Ingres source code control tool, piccolo, is the pre-cursor to Perforce’s P4.
21. La Source is a portrait by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres – The source is a community contribution by Ingres.
22. There are 19,235 files in the Ingres 9.3 source tarball for Windows.
23. The average tenure of an Ingres DBMS Engineer is 15+ years.
24. The most ugly customer escalations happen at 5pm Eastern on the Friday of a holiday weekend.  (Oops that’s now!)
25.  There’s an easter egg or two hidden within Ingres. When you issue the SQL statement

select xyzzy(”)\g

It produces the result

┌──────────────────────────────┐
│col1 │
├──────────────────────────────┤
│Nothing happens. │
└──────────────────────────────┘

(1 row)
This was later “enhanced” by Doug Inkster

select xyzzy(’wim’)\g

Executing . . .

┌──────────────────────────────┐
│col1 │
├──────────────────────────────┤
│Nothing happens to Wim. │
└──────────────────────────────┘

(1 row)

I’d welcome your corrections if any of these facts are wrong.

 

  Posted in Other

This entry was posted on Friday, February 13th, 2009 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Other. 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.