Saturday was spent brainstorming and prioritizing project ideas, setting up build environments, along with a smattering of training. Today we got down to the task of coding. It’s now lunchtime on Sunday, and so far today we’ve addressed a usbaility issue with the Ingres terminal monitor, produced a proof of concept for an incremental back-up feature, extended row-level security auditing so that it now audits selects, inserts, updates and deletes, posted a new version of Ingres CAFE which is optimized for performance of web applications, and have half completed the code for a few other projects including the ability to generate a shuffled sequence of values.

It’s now 4pm on Sunday afternoon and the substantial Sunday lunch we enjoyed a couple of hours ago is starting to take its toll on developer productivity. There are many ways to a developers heart, and most of them are through their stomachs. Since it’s a little early in the day to introduce alcohol, I’ve decided to pop across the street to Marks and Spencer’s and buy icecream bars for everyone. A mid-afternoon sugar rush should push the productivity levels back up to where they were this morning.

It’s now 5pm and the ice cream treat definitely pushed the productivity levels back up to the pre-lunchtime levels. We’ve declared victory on pretty much every project that we undertook today, in fact we’re feeling so smugh that we’ve decided to add a stretch project or two into the mix for tomorrow and will probably wrap things up shortly and head out for some well deserved beers. Which reminds me, one of the projects for tomorrow is to add beer as a native type to Ingres…

It’s now 6pm on Monday and the day seemed endless - I shouldn’t have had that last dozen Heinekens. Ugh! I had an awful hangover this morning, but thankfully it had lifted midday and I had a wonderful lunch with Jessica Twentyman, the author of that wonderful FT article on Women in IT. Andrew Lloyd Webber was dining at the table next to us and I resisted the tempation to tell him how much my mom dislikes him since he decided against the Irish contestant in “I’d do anything” That WSJ blog finally made it to slashdot today and I’ve been flamed all afternoon, some of it gentle, some of it more like taking a walk on the sun. Today we wrapped up a number of yesterday’s projects and tackled some new ones - Doug added the syntax for renaming a column, we made some progress on the beer type, added locale information to the unload and copydb scripts. We’re prearing a build which combines all of the new features and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that a live demonstration will be possible tomorrow.

In the intervening years, significant improvements were made to the technology. Windows4GL was renamed OpenROAD (Open Rapid Object Application Development) to emphasize the fact that it’s an open development environment, not just for Ingres, with which you can unlock data and business logic on a variety of platforms from DB2 on the mainframe to SQL Server on the desktop.

For those of you not familiar with Ingres OpenROAD, there’s a lot of useful information and webinars at: http://community.ingres.com/wiki/Ingres_OpenROAD_Learn

You may have seen the press announcement yesterday that we have contributed Ingres OpenROAD to the open source community. This decision was a direct result of lobbying from developers within the Ingres OpenROAD community. We tested their commitment to the project by challenging them to contribute something to the community in advance of the announcement and, as you can see from the press release, we’ve already received some valuable contributions.

The process of preparing a commercially developed product for contribution to the open source community is a lengthy one and the Ingres OpenROAD team, together with key community constituents, deserves significant kudos for the work done. I was helping with some last-minute testing over the weekend and was impressed with how easy they’ve made it for developers to roll up their sleeves and get involved. If you visit the Community page at http://community.ingres.com/wiki/Ingres_OpenROAD_Community you’ll see that we’ve already signed up a number of new community members and we’re maintaining a growing list of projects at http://community.ingres.com/wiki/Ingres_OpenROAD_Projects.

I asked my colleague David Tondreau for a succinct description of Ingres OpenROAD and I believe he captured its very essence in the following:

“OpenROAD is truly what its name professes: “Open Rapid Object Application Development”. With the open sourcing of OpenROAD, Ingres Corp. has put the true “open” in OpenROAD. Put very simply, OpenROAD is the fastest way to build Ingres applications.”

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. Since most data centers typically operate smoothly under a standard set of procedures, it’s how things are handled at crisis points that separates the women from the boys.

My interviewer, Jessica Twentyman, had done her homework. The questions she posed to me all related to the role women play in engineering, a topic with which I’m intimately familiar. We had a great chat, and the one question I had to think long and hard about was how code written by a woman would differ from that written by a man, and whether or not I’d be able to identify the gender of the author of a piece of code. This is nothing I’d ever thought about before, and given our strict coding standards at Ingres, our code is fairly androgynous. My answer to that question, as well as the rest of the interview is available online at the Financial Times. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this issue: Do you think there’s a difference between how men and women write code, and if so, how does the code differ?

From my days at CA I know two of the other women interviewed for the Financial Times article, Siki Giunta and Jacqueline de Rojas. Who knew that CA was a breeding ground for successful women in IT?

We have a viral marketing campaign underway at Ingres right now promoting women in open source, and we made some great t-shirts as part of that campaign with this phrase silkscreened across the chest: GirlsinOpenSource. There’s a story behind the t-shirts that I’ll share in a future blog. If you’re a woman in open source we’d love to hear from you, so drop us a line and we’ll start up a conversation—and get a t-shirt out to you in the mail.

On a related note, I heard a startling statistic from the PostgreSQL community yesterday, that less than 20% of the changes that are submitted by the community are accepted into the project. With Ingres we make every effort to accept all changes. We are involved with the community every step of the way, before, during, and after implementation and we’re always looking for new community developers, so if you’ve tried and been unsuccesful in engaging with PostgreSQL, then please come join the Ingres project. We will welcome you with open arms.

I’ve always wanted to visit Prague so I decided to take advantage of the fact that I was coming to Europe for the partner summit to spend some time sightseeing. On Sunday I set out on a 4 hour tour of the city and was amazed at the parallels that could be drawn between this beautiful city and Ingres.

Prague enjoyed a golden age in the past and stands on the threshold of a new era. Prague has a lot of beautifully architected buildings whose classic design has withstood the test of time. Other buildings were erected, and then demolished and, redesigned, and rebuilt as advances were made in architecture – in much the way we’ve done with parts of the Ingres code over the years. Still others, such as the Dancing House Frank Gehry, have a thoroughly modern cutting edge design like many of the recent additions to Ingres. The blend of the classic with the post-modern reminds me a lot of Ingres.

To compare the time Ingres spent under the control of CA with the communist era would be crass and inaccurate, but certainly both Prague and Ingres have seen significant improvement and investment since they were liberated from their previous controllers and both have passed through the threshold to a new and brighter era.

More photos from the Ingres Partner Summit can be found at: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=32507&l=787eb&id=577801678

Following a recent conversation with our CIO, Doug Harr, who is a walking wikipedia of information relating to music, I decided to purchase the game “Rock Band” for my PS3. Rock Band includes peripherals to simulate electric guitar, bass and a drum kit as well as a microphone for the lead vocalist. The aim is to form a band and to score points by hitting scrolling notes on-screen. I’ve always wanted to play drums, but being devoid of rhythm and being completely uncoordinated I believed it was beyond me, but I’m really adept at computer games, so I figured that if I could treat it as a game rather than a musical challenge I could probably beat it (pun intended). I’m happy to report that I’m hitting notes now with 95%+ accuracy, which is on a par with my more coordinated and rhythmic friends.

I now have two games with almost identical USB peripherals to simulate guitars for the PS3 and I’m irritated by the fact that the peripherals are incompatible. There are third party peripherals available that will work with either “Rock Band” or “Guitar Hero”, but the manufacturers of these games have decided to cripple their peripherals to maximize their profits. It seems that taking advantage of one’s position as the sole provider of a piece of software to maximize revenue is not limited to the business software world.

Doug Harr is going to join me in the Ingres blogosphere next week. Doug’s blog will focus on our 100% OSS/SaaS strategy and like topics. He will mix in some tidbits about music and parallels in that marketplace. I’m sure it will be fun and informative, and I for one can’t wait to read him

On Tuesday, we announced the availability of Ingres CAFÉ, a community developed bundle that makes it easy for Eclipse developers to get started with Ingres and Eclipse. The bundle was developed by Samrat Dhillon of Carleton University, and we brought Samrat along to EclipseCon so that he could demonstrate it in person. What Samrat has done is to package Ingres, Eclipse (including the Ingres DTP plug-in), Hibernate, Tomcat, and JSF together with a simple installation process that lays down the entire package, with the components hard-wired to work together, with just three clicks. The bundle includes best of breed open source technologies packaged for flexibility. If, for instance, we decide to extend the scope to include Eclipse BIRT or the Spring Framework, it wouldn’t be difficult to do so.

The presentation that I delivered at EclipseCon was a humorous look at using a Sony PS3 for Eclipse development. It was meant as a light-hearted session to end a long day, but to my great surprise I had about a half a dozen attendees stay behind at the end of the presentation to ask questions about floating point arithmetic and building eight node PS3 clusters. Developers! You’ve got to love them!

PostgreSQL I saw as a kit car. It is built with love, care, and attention, but difficult to get insurance for and no obvious place to take it when problems arise. Although, there are those that will fix it for a fee.

MySQL (now Sun) I saw as a silver Honda Civic. It is hugely popular, but most people who drive it do so because of the price. Now you can soup up a Civic by adding stripes, a spoiler and funky blue neon under carriage lights, but it’s still a Civic. There are some who take their Honda Civics seriously and have been known to switch out the factory engine and to even add nitrous oxide tanks to the car but by the time you’ve done all that you may as well have bought the car you really wanted.

So what do you think? What car do you envision Ingres as and why?

Yesterday I encountered a problem with my device when the Blackberry Messenger icon wouldn’t respond. It hasn’t happened before, but I’ve learned that pulling the battery usually fixes problems of this nature so I did that, and paced the halls for two minutes while the device power cycled. When it came back on-line the Blackberry Messenger icon had disappeared altogether. I searched bytes high and low but didn’t find it. I started with Google and then turned to the Blackberry Forums for assistance. I tried pretty much every suggestion I could find and finally resorted to chatting on-line with a technician. The first suggestion I received was to wipe my device of all data; I couldn’t quite understood how that would solve the problem, nor could the technician, but we tried it anyway — to no avail. Next up was wiping the device of all software and reinstalling it from the operating system layer up, but this too failed to reinstate the messenger icon. The instructions got increasingly ridiculous and far fetched, but I persevered until support closed at 11pm. Yes, that’s right; a service provider on which many of us are dependent for a critical business function closes their support center at 11pm Eastern.

After a sleepless night I was back on-line at 6am to chat with support, but to my complete shock I learned that support doesn’t power on their PCs, or pick up their phones until 8am. At 8am in NY, the Europeans are half way through their business day, but my business service provider is just getting started. I was hopeful though, that after a good night’s sleep a new technician would crack the problem in minutes, but that wasn’t to be. In fact, when I mentioned that my colleague had exactly the same problem on a different model Blackberry but on their network, they told me that they’d exhausted their list of suggestions and asked that I have our IT hero, Luigi, try to crack it instead. I was transported to the early 90s when support was offered during business hours and the remedy to all problems was to reboot the PC.

I’ve blogged about the Ingres Service Network (ISN) in the past, and I’ve spoken at events about the need to turn the customer support experience on its head. The only silver lining I can see in this is that I’ll have added a few more personal anecdotes to my repertoire, and that I’m more certain than ever that we’re doing the right thing in focusing on building a completely new customer support experience. But for now, I’m wearing a hat crafted from aluminum foil, standing on one leg, facing east, while chanting the Ingres Source Code backward in an attempt to resurrect the Blackberry Messenger icon. Of course, if RIM were to open their source code, I could probably have fixed the problem myself overnight.

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.

It will come as no surprise to learn that I’ve no experience with treadmills, so I turned to the internet for research and guidance. I learned that there were four key factors that should influence decision making: the width and length of the platform, the size of the engine, and the price; pretty much all of the websites I visited advised against machines under the magical $1000 price tag. Outside of the stock market, this is the first time that I’ve encountered a buying recommendation based on price and I found it perplexing. Price may be an indicator of some underlying factors that I should be considering in my selection process, but what’s the difference between a $950 and a $1050 treadmill? From comparing various models I could see that for some brands it could represent the difference between a wireless rather than wired heart rate monitor, d! eeper cup holders, built in fan, but did these features matter to me? Some of the machines that came in under the $1000 mark had a $250 shipping fee while some of those over $1000 offered free shipping, some had a four year warranty, others a lifetime warranty. Making purchase price a selection criteria went against everything I stand for, so after deciding on what mattered to me in a treadmill, I did my own TCO study and made a decision based on my findings.

One of the challenges that we have in open source is in convincing those who believe that you get what you pay for, that they should ignore the price-tag, and make a decision based upon the criteria that matter to their business. There are those who have a preconceived idea as to what they should be spending on a database, and it’s difficult to have them take you seriously if you’re carrying a $0 price tag. I’ve long ago learned that people put a value on goods dependent upon what they pay for them, and we need to educate these people to consider value, and not purchase price. First one needs to consider business requirements like transaction rates, workload, availability, service levels, 24×7 support, platform support, availability of skilled resources, etc. etc. Then, if all of the boxes are ticked, a TCO study should be conducted and at this point it will become obvious that if an open source solution is under consideration it will exhibit a compelling value proposition.

There’s a beer in Europe called Stella Artois which advertises itself under the tagline “Reassuringly Expensive” and while it costs the same as other beers in its class, there are those who buy it because of that tag line. These are probably the same people who place extra importance on their Oracle deployments every year that their license fees are increased.