It’s a database Jim, but not as you know it!
January 26th, 2010
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!
January 27th, 2010 at 3:20 am
I am certainly looking forward to giving VectorWise a road test. I’ve been keen to see Ingres get away from the file-of-records model of physical storage for years. Exploiting vector processing is just one reason why it needed to happen (but not, I admit, the specific reason I had in mind when I was ranting at the Product Advisory Council meeting in Islandia all those years ago).
I don’t entirely agree with your final comment. The great thing about VectorWise is that if it works right, then as far as the programmer will be able to tell, it is a database (sic) EXACTLY as we know it. Just way waaaaaaaaay faster.
Yes, I am very old, but like HH, I am convinced I am irrestistable. You can’t tell me different. I am not listening. La-la-la-…