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…)

Well actually I don’t! After years of feeling uncomfortable on a dance floor, I decided to go to the Arthur Murray Dance School for one-on-one dance tuition. Things didn’t go too well in my initial evaluation, and after an hour the instructor informed me that it was impossible to teach me to dance, I had no sense of rhythm and she was going to give me a complete refund of my money. It was the first time the instructor had ever had to admit defeat and I think we were equally disappointed. I can’t imagine an Ingres instructor ever telling a client that they could never be taught to be an Ingres DBA, but I could be wrong. (more…)

One of my many vices is that I’m a junk TV addict; I live alone in a house with six TVs, three DVRs, a blue-ray disc player, and a Slingbox so that I can feed my addiction while I’m on the road. I’ll waste as much as three hours a day catching up on the latest junk TV, and just like junk food it’s compulsive but completely unmemorable. I read with great interest in Monday’s New York Times about a device that will allow users to convert pretty much any video source into an MP4 on either a memory card or USB storage device, and the most amazing thing about the device is that it’s an open source hardware platform. (more…)

I was thrilled to hear yesterday that Ingres has been selected from a field of 1800 as a finalist in the “Red Herring 100 Global” Award. This means that Red Herring has judged Ingres as one of the best tech startups in the world, which shouldn’t really come as a surprise given the level of innovation that’s happening within Ingres. (more…)

Following last week’s blog Roy asked why DBMS vendors continue to implement logical rows as physical rows indistinguishable from records in files and suggested that we at the conclusion of his comment he questioned how far we’d come since the mid-70’s. Bill Maimone, Chief Architect at Ingres, had the following thoughts on the topic:

Actually, we’ve come a long way since the mid-70’s.

The beginning of the forward march of progress was making that separation between logical tables and physical tables. This abstraction made it easy to write a program that accessed those records without depending on the actual physical location or layout of the records. It’s not that one couldn’t have written programs like this in 1975. (more…)

Earlier this month a database blog was established at www.databasecolumn.com as a platform for database luminaries such as Michael Stonebraker, Jerry Held and David Dewitt to share their thoughts on database technology and innovation. The prospect of hearing from these database giants on a regular basis caused great excitement in the database world and the first column, authored by Mike Stonebraker, has received tremendous coverage. Every time Mike Stonebraker forecasts the end of the RDBMS world it causes a stir. (more…)

I’ve noticed that many of the most successful software initiatives have acronyms that are either catchy or pronounceable; think LAMP, SQL, AJAX and SOA. It struck me that we might want to consider adding a word such as zippy/zealous/zesty or zingy to the name of the Icebreaker Business Intelligence Z% Appliance to make its acronym pronounceable. Ibiza, the Spanish island resort, is a melting pot, it’s hip, fast and is active around the clock. (more…)