I’m writing this from a hotel conference room in London where we’re in the middle of a development sprint. We’ve gathered a random mix of two dozen people drawn from our community together with folks from the Ingres engineering and services teams to see what we can achieve in a three day code sprint. We started the event with a brainstorming session where we came up with dozens of ideas of things that we could undertake and narrowed the list down to about a dozen projects that we hope to complete before Roy’s opening session at the Ingres User Association meeting on Tuesday. By the way, if you’d like to attend the UK IUA there’s still time to register at http://www.iua.org.uk (more…)

When I started working at Ingres in Dublin back in 1992 one of the first projects I was assigned was to port Ingres to IBM OS/2. At that time the Windows4GL team was also undertaking an OS/2 port, and I was able to leverage much of the work that Joe Kronk, Puree Charoenpong, and the rest of the Windows4GL team had done to complete the first port of the DBMS to a desktop platform. I was curious about the Windows4GL technology and within weeks of joining Ingres I sat through an introductory Windows4GL training class. I was amazed at how quickly I could build relatively complex data-centric applications with a cool GUI interface. (more…)

I do dozens of press and analyst briefings each year and I’m usually pretty confident that I can handle any question that comes my way. I’ve come a long way since that time at Comdex when I declared to an audience that included a lot of press members what I would have chosen as an alternate career. More on that in a future blog.

I did an interview recently the preparation for which had me totally perplexed. I understood from the briefing sheet that the interview would include questions about how a data center run by a woman would differ from one run by a man. I’ve never run a data center, and if I had I don’t think I would have put up window treatments and floral wallpaper, so I turned to my colleagues for input in answering this question. The one consistent answer I received that resonated with me is that women are more collaborative and, in a time of crisis, will pull a team together to get the problem resolved. (more…)

It was St Patrick’s Day last Monday, and I started the day feeling a little blue rather than green. I was to have spent the weekend in Dublin with my family, but instead found myself at an Eclipse Foundation board meeting in Santa Clara. I’ve recently been elected to the board of the Eclipse Foundation to represent the add-in provider community which includes Ingres and our friends at Laszlo and Red Hat. It was an insightful meeting and getting the opportunity to meet 1200 Eclipse Developers meant that EclipseCon was definitely worth sacrificing my planned St Patrick’s Day in Dublin. (more…)

Regular readers of this comp.databases.ingres/info-ingres will have seen a recent thread where members of the Ingres community threw down the gauntlet and challenged Ingres to establish an Ingres Janitors Project styled on the Linux Kernel Janitors Project.  Never one to shy away from a challenge, I picked up that gauntlet and I’m in the process of working with the folks on that discussion thread to define and establish an Ingres Janitors Project.  We’ve already started populating the Ingres Community Wiki with content for this project and when we’re ready to launch it you should see something both here and on comp.databases.ingres.

On a somewhat related note, the Ingres Community Wiki is using MediaWiki powered by Ingres, and I have to say that it’s an absolute pleasure to work with it.  If you’re considering deploying a wiki you should definitely consider this one.

Back in October 2004 the UK Ingres User Association hosted a user group meeting in Blackpool. For those of you unfamiliar with Blackpool, it’s a popular seaside resort in the UK, with a spectacular stretch of illuminations. As a first time visitor to Blackpool I took some time out between the conference and the “networking” at the bar to explore the beachfront, and I was bemused to find a series of “Please Contribute” signs lighting the way. As we had just contributed Ingres to open source I was able to easily work a photo of one of those signs into my presentation the following morning.

I was reminded of that photograph earlier today when discussing our newly posted Ruby Driver with some colleagues. The driver originated as a community contribution funded by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children were making use of Ruby before it was on our list of interesting development platforms and funded a development project to build a Ruby driver to Ingres. (more…)

I’ve always had a voracious appetite for books, but I have to admit that I never read product user guides. I’ll dive head first into a new piece of technology and uncover how things work for myself rather than investing the time in reading the user documentation. I’ve noticed that this is a growing trend and that many software consumers will use the documentation only as a last resort. Obviously the price we pay for not reading the documentation is that it’s unlikely that we’re getting the full benefit the technology provides and whole areas of functionality can go undiscovered. (more…)