One of my favorite parts of my job is to talk about and demonstrate our technology to new audiences. In every audience I’ll find those who assumed that Ingres had died back in the 90’s after the CA acquisition. For certain audiences, if I think it appropriate, I’ll borrow a quote from Mark Twain to title my presentation “The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated”. To counter the perception that the product might be dated I’ll always highlight our latest technology innovations at the beginning and end of the presentation and sandwich advanced features like partitioning, parallel query, configuration management etc in between. In January I decided that using Vista as the platform for demonstrating Ingres would make it look fresher, especially given the fact that we’ve adopted a native Vista look and feel for our database administration tools. What a mistake! Since January I feel like I’ve been transported back to a time when blue screens were acceptable, where plug-and-pray was the order of the day, where backward compatibility was optional and waiting for the first service pack to be released was the recommended practice. (more…)