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.

 

  Posted in Other

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 at 7:36 am 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.