In the early days of Ingres Corp, the AR-PR team did an exercise with the executive team to understand how they viewed Ingres. One of the questions they asked was “If Ingres was a car what car would it be?” I’m not really a car person, so I answered “C Class Mercedes Benz”. Now the fact that I drive a C Class Benz with a license plate that reads “INGRES” probably had something to do with my answer, but I was able to back up my response. My car provides great value for the money, is very well equipped, incredibly reliable, and handles anything that’s thrown at it with ease. It is backed up by an amazing team, and has roots in Europe and in the US. There are obviously cars out there that can go from 0-60 faster and can achieve greater speeds, but (more…)

I grew up in Ireland, a land of saints and scholars, where we’re uniquely blessed with an expansive and colorful vocabulary. My father banned only one word from the family home, that word was “cheap”. We learned an understanding and appreciation for ”value” from an early age, and in fact we conducted “TCO” studies long before we understood that term. “Cheap”, we learned, was a waste of hard earned money, “inexpensive”, on the other hand, could often be a part of a good value proposition.

This year I’ve resolved to get fit and decided to buy a treadmill so that I could combine my love of junk TV with exercise.

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I noticed that one of the PostgreSQL community members who participated in my OSCON session mentioned it in his blog. He refers to my Oracle bashing slide and expresses relief that there wasn’t a Postgres bashing slide in my deck. To be honest, I really respect the PostgreSQL technology and the community that’s built it, and can’t imagine myself ever bashing them. Oracle on the other hand, well, that’s another story. As you’re no doubt aware, Oracle recently unleashed Oracle 11g on the world. The new software release has over four hundred (400!) new features! (more…)

I started using Ingres very early in my career. I was developing a network management center for a small start-up and we needed a database to store historical data. We didn’t have a budget for a database so we started using Ingres because it was distributed for free with a UNIX desktop platform. I really enjoyed working with Ingres, both the technology and the people, and applied to join the “Ingres Desktop Center of Excellence” as soon as I saw that they were recruiting in Dublin back in the early 90s. We had a tight knit and hard working team in Dublin and we were really upset when CA shut the Dublin operation down in 1994. I moved to the CA/Ingres office in Chelsea, London and have very fond memories of working with the Ingres folks in Anchor House. The new Ingres Corporation is much like the old Ingres and it never ceases to amaze me how much affection for the Ingres brand survives to this day. (more…)

When out for dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Vegas with the Ingres crew a few weeks ago, and it struck me that the creator of the Lazy Susan most probably named it after his ex-wife or girlfriend, and that she no doubt flinched every time one was set down on her dinner table. Since my Blackberry is never out of my hands I decided to check it out in Wikipedia and learned that the invention is attributed to Thomas Jefferson who may have named it for his daughter Susan who had complained of never getting enough to eat and of leaving the table hungry. I like the Lazy Susan as a food delivery mechanism; I can get what I want easily, I can try things without a real commitment, if I like something I can always get more, everyone at the table can build a completely different meal from the same set of dishes, I can recommend stuff to friends and get it to them instantaneously and if I don’t like something I can make it disappear to the other side of the table fairly quickly. The parallels to open source software are obvious, although we like to think of our community as smart rather than lazy. (more…)