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…)

Regular readers of my blog will recall that late last year I described France as a hot-bed of open source activity. Today you may have seen the announcement from the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), of which Ingres is a member, announcing the formation of OSA Europe. The European Chapter of the OSA shares the goal of building compelling open solutions, based upon the integration and interoperability of best of breed open source solutions, and promoting best practices and frameworks around these solutions.

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“The problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur”; depending upon your perspective the author of this quote is either incredibly clever, or incredibly naive, but either way I think he’d be very much in awe of the French Revolution that’s underway today. The government in France has woken up to the fact that to retain their position as a force majeure that they need to reinvent themselves and to that end they are funding entrepreneurs and innovative endeavors. (more…)

I’m in Europe this week meeting with customers, partners and open source project teams. The biggest news story of the week spans the popular business and technology press and relates to the loss of two CDs containing personal information for 25 million UK citizens. Having been the victim of identity fraud in the past I know exactly what’s ahead of these folks to ensure that this event doesn’t affect their ability to buy a house or a car in the future. It took me 18 months to undo the damage done to my own credit rating and now I take a belt and braces approach to protecting my personal data: I have put an alert on my credit record with all of the major credit reporting agencies, check my credit record on a monthly basis and shred all correspondence.

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Last week we had a hugely successful Ingres User Group meeting in the UK with twice as many attendees as our 2006 event. It was great to see a number of new faces in the audience, and I heard it described by some of our more seasoned customers as the best Ingres event in years. We had tremendous partner support at the event with speakers and exhibitors representing Ingres partners new and old. Donald MacCormick from Business Objects delivered a particularly interesting keynote, providing entertaining anecdotes of how business intelligence benefits the business and real worlds. After a visit with the Ingres team in the Paris office, I spent the weekend visiting Burgundy’s finest wine producers with two of my colleagues from Ingres. We discovered that the production of wine is a more complex challenge, with more moving parts, than engineering a multi-threaded DBMS server. (more…)