The Ingres VectorWise beta program garnered a lot of interest from existing Ingres customers and partners and from shiny new prospects looking for a BI solution that could provide real-time analytics without breaking the bank.   In a couple of cases the beta roll-out was stalled pending approval and procurement of hardware.   Getting feedback from real-world scenarios is crucial to the success of any new product so we needed to look ‘outside the box’ (excuse the deliberate pun) to keep the momentum going.   We immediately thought of setting up a pre-configured AMI with everything needed to get started with Ingres VectorWise, but we were concerned that perhaps the performance of cloud storage would be an issue.   After some testing with various data volumes on Amazon’s EBS we were delighted to note that the performance was far better than predicted to the point of being an acceptable platform for Ingres VectorWise deployment.   We had a number of our beta sites test in the Cloud and the feedback we received was very positive.  

Given our success with the Amazon EC2  the obvious next question was what about private clouds, other public clouds, hybrid clouds where part of the infrastructure is in a private cloud and part in a public cloud, the scenarios were endless.   To build solutions for all of the various combinations was going to be time consuming and time is money!  

A few weeks ago during one of our regular calls with Red Hat re our Cloud Foundations collaboration mention was made of a new innovation that would allow us to pre-assemble the components we wanted to include in our machine image and choose the deployment platform from within the development environment.  This will greatly speed-up and simplify the production and testing of Ingres solutions for all of the various cloud types and provide a flexible platform for innovation.   

The massive demand for mobile applications has resulted in the need for a reliable and scalable platform to support these applications and the cloud provides that platform.   Embracing the production of standards in collaboration with others, who know what it means to build business critical applications, will mean that whether you use mobile applications to close that next big deal, or to find the nearest happy-hour, the technology stack behind it will ensure your needs are met.

Related Links:
http://blogs.ingres.com/ketankaria/2010/08/25/opening-in-the-cloud/

http://press.redhat.com/2010/08/25/red-hat-paas-build-any-way-deploy-anywhere/

http://www.ctoedge.com/content/red-hat-expands-cloud-portfolio

 

When we announced Ingres VectorWise at the UK IUA, earlier this month, we did a live demonstration running a query against Ingres VectorWise in the Amazon Cloud.  To give a point of comparison we ran the identical query against a  market leading Enterprise DBMS.    We masked the competitor’s identity, to save them embarassment, but unfortunately that company’s name slipped from Roger’s lips during the demo so when you watch the video of the demo on YouTube be prepared for a very loud beep, which we used to save their blushes. 

Interesting fact: “El Caro” in Spanish means “Expensive”.

 

Top of my wish list was an Apple iPad.  I’ve had an iPod Touch for a number of years, and a scaled up version of the iPod Touch seems like a great addition to my collection of book-sized toys which currently includes an HP net-book and a Kindle.  Given the amount of time I spend on the road I decided that rather than splurging for the Wi-fi version, which is available today, I’d wait for the 3G version, which will be available at the end of the month.   But given my OCD tendencies and the ‘found money’ burning holes in my pockets, the end of the month seemed like a lifetime away.  I already have a 3G air-card from my cell phone provider, which I can move  between my mobile computers, so I decided that perhaps I wouldn’t have to take on another $30 a month subscription with AT&T for the iPad’s 3G capabilities and more importantly I could nip out to the local Apple Store at lunchtime to pick up a wi-fi version of the iPad today.   I have to admit to being shocked to learn that the iPad doesn’t have any USB ports into which I could plug my air-card.  As a gadget freak I have to say that I found it hard to believe that anyone could produce a device without USB connectivity.   There are ways to rig up 3G connectivity for the wi-fi version of the iPad but they all involve an additional piece of technology and an additional subscription for a 3G service.

The early reports of over-heating and wi-fi problems were issues that I was willing to work through.  The fact that the iPad doesn’t support Flash wasn’t something that I was overly concerned about because I figured that was something that would be resolved down the line.  I was also willing to ignore the fact that it doesn’t run Linux because I suspect that the Linux Community will find a way of getting Linux on there sooner rather than later.

So, despite the fact that the iPad represents the antithesis of open source, I was still set on purchasing one after work this evening.   That was until I received this tech flash from The New York Times.  For Apple, a company that is renowned for innovation and inventing new markets, to tie the hands of application developers behind their backs like this is unconscionable and I for one am voting with my credit-card.  I didn’t have immediate plans to build my own iPad apps, but the proprietary behavior displayed by Apple is so galling that not only am I not getting an iPad, I am also shelving plans to switch out my Blackberry for an iPhone.  Instead of splurging nearly a grand on an iPad and accessories today I am now going to wait a couple of months and spend about half of that on a Linux iPad clone.  I guess I better go line my pant pockets with asbestos!

Related links:

http://theflashblog.com/?p=1888

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/09/adobe-go-screw-yourself-apple-2/

http://www.mobilephonedevelopment.com/

 

1. Think of it as step 1 on the road out of living in your parent’s basement, eating hot pockets and playing WoW day and night. (In retrospect those last two don’t sound so bad!)

2. College Education – $43,600; Ultimate Gaming Laptop – $4,700; Finding a bug in code written by Linus Torvalds – Priceless

3. Your open source submissions may distract prospective employers from those photos of  you dressed as David Hasselhoff  that your friends tagged on Facebook.*

4. If you like WoW, you’ll love open source - even your most pleasant interactions on some open source projects will feel like you’re taking on level 82 elite mobs in Icecrown.

5. While you may think that Drupal is your one true love, unless you code-around you’ll never know for sure.

6. If you get accepted into the Google Summer of Codeyou can get paid to write code in your Sponge Bob jim-jams.

7. You can get involved in serious debates about the benefits of translating a project into Klingon or sign up to join a project to Train a Toy Elephant.

8. Jeans and a t-shirt is “dressed-up”.

9. Your favorite “Bow before me, for I am root” t-shirt will pale in comparison to the collection of hilarious open source t-shirts that you’ll assemble.

10. Open Source is an EgoSystem and you know that you’re going to be king.

* – this is obviously fictional and any resemblance it may bear to a real Ingres employee is purely coincidental.

 

I believe that open source is an obvious way for students to gain some real world experience on large scale software projects.   There’s an enormous difference between submitting your work to be reviewed and rated by your professor/teacher and enduring the baptism of fire that usually accompanies your first submission to an open source project.   Another huge benefit that open source development provides to students is that it gives them an opportunity to identify what aspects of IT they are passionate about.  Open source projects run the gamut from web browsers to gaming engines and everything in between and there are roles for developers, testers, bug fixers, translators, tech writers, artists etc. etc. I’ve blogged on this topic in the past which you can read here. 

I’m looking to fill a junior rolein my team at present and I find it interesting, and somewhat depressing, to note that we are seeing lots of applications from people with 10+ year’s experience applying for a junior role, because of the current state of the job’s market.  I am also seeing resumes from recent college graduates, some of whom have not found employment in the tech sector since graduting from college over the past two years.   Skimming college graduate resumes is usually easy and I always start by looking for involvement in open source projects and use this to quickly identify the type of self-starter that would fit within my team.  

Linda Broughton and Leia Bassett of nti Leeds were my genial and gracious hosts for the English leg of my trip, and given their knowledge of open source I hope that they are able to work with the Hull University students to arrange a future Girl Geek Dinner at which they could provide a speaker who could give an overview of open source and faciliate an exchange of ideas on the topic.

Normally I like to book-end a trip to Europe with a weekend with my family in Dublin, but this time around I had to hurry back to New York because I’d volunteered to participate in a number of events that weekend including a “Polar Plunge” to raise funds for the Special Olympics.   And just because I have no shame, and have littered recent blogs with personal pics, I’ve deicded to share a photo of that event with you. 

Related links:
http://drtraceymadden.wordpress.com/2010/03/12/has-oer-anything-to-learn-from-open-source/
http://wordpress.org/development/2010/03/summer-of-wordpress-2010/

 

Computer Engineering is Barbie’s 126th career and I, for one, would be interested to know if any of Barbie’s prior career choices, or hobbies, have influenced the career decisions of the younger generation.    My assumption that Girl Geeks were unlikely to have been big Barbie fans in their youth was proven incorrect, as the room was fairly evenly divided between those who played with Barbie (or her larger headed European cousin Sindy), and those who didn’t.  The general consensus at the Edinburgh Girl Geek Dinner was that the addition of a Computer Engineer Barbie could only help raise awareness of Computer Engineering as a career choice and that many of us making purchasing decisions about Barbie dolls would likely choose this as an option when it’s released in the fall.

The Edinburgh Girl Geek Dinner was attended by a large audience of women* drawn from various technology related backgrounds and I found it was a great opportunity to network with inspiring women who are blazing a trail for future generations.   While in Edinburgh I had the opportunity to meet with a number of female entrepreneurs, students, educators and researchers, each of whom left a great impression on me.   Edinburgh has a great buzz about it and I was happy to note that the depression that accompanies the current economic recession doesn’t seem to have permeated the city at all. 

In doing research on the topic of Software Engineer Barbie I was delighted to see that there’s a Harley Davidson Barbie, but surprised to note that she doesn’t look anything like 42 year old Software Engineer Barbie going through a mid-life crisis.

* – The A/V team in Edinburgh was male, and a male journalist, Phil Harris from Square  Go, was also in attendance at the event. 

Tune in tomorrow for a blog on the Girl Geek Dinner at Hull University.

 

As a little girl I idolized my father who was a mechanical services engineer.  I was a “tom boy” and my father always encouraged my interest in science, engineering and computers by spending a small fortune feeding my technology addiction.   I aspired to be just like my dad and to me a career in engineering seemed like a fascinating and obvious choice.   When it came to discussing my career ambitions with my dad I was devastated when he tried to discourage me from becoming an engineer by telling me bluntly that he’d never hire a female engineer and couldn’t think of one of his friends who would.  

Dad was probably as devastated as I was to have to have that conversation, but it was Ireland in the early 80s and there were girl’s schools in Ireland back then that didn’t even teach math to the level required to qualify to study engineering at the University level.

Some teenagers rebel against their parents by getting tattoos, body piercings, having a child out of wedlock, or abusing drugs; I rebelled by acquiring a degree in electronic engineering.  

My sister Tara was my polar opposite.  From an early age it seemed that Tara’s ambition in life was to get married and become the perfect wife and mother.  Tara was as obsessed with dolls and dresses as I was with mechanics and computers.   Tara would probably have been the perfect target market for Computer Engineering Barbie but I suspect that Tara’s Barbie would not have been slinging code, but instead would have been posting photos of her perfect family on Facebook and Skyping with her husband Ken who was the multi-millionaire founder of an internet start-up.   Would Software Engineering Barbie have changed Tara’s career ambitions?  Not a chance! 

I’ve never owned a Barbie in my life.  In fact growing up I loathed everything that Barbie and her gender stereo-typing stood for.  Does the fact that Software Engineering Barbie will soon join the Barbie stable of playmates mean that Software Engineering is now considered an acceptable profession for Barbie loving girly-girls?

I’m visiting Scotland in a couple of weeks to speak at a Girl Geek event and will be visiting universities in Edinburgh and Glasgow while I’m there.  I plan to ask the latest crop of female engineering students what their take on this whole Barbie thing is, and post a follow-on blog then.

If you want Deb’s take on Software Engineering Barbie, you can check out her blog on the topic here.  John Smedley pointed me to the following link which includes ideas on how to make Computer Engineer Barbie more realistic.

Epilogue: My father passed away during the time that we were forming Ingres Corporation but he couldn’t have been prouder of my accomplishments.  Tara went on to marry Stephen, a software engineer, and is now the perfect wife and mother and a regular Facebook updater.

 

Earlier today we announced the Ingres VectorWise technology preview program which gives our partners and customers an opportunity to kick the tires on an early version of the product, while the engineering team holds it breath and hopes that the doors don’t fall off.  To be fair to the Ingres VectorWise team my emerging technologies guys have been playing with Ingres VectorWise for a couple of months now and are completely blown away by its performance and impressed with the stability of the product.

Many of us in Ingres Engineering have spent more years than we’d care to admit working with database technologies and have seen database trends, such as object-relational databases, come and go, so there was some healthy skepticism about the VectorWise project’s chance for success.  Having lived through the Jasmine project at CA we learned that bolting two pieces of database technologies together  isn’t easy and that the results aren’t always pretty.

I’ll admit that when I saw the initial project plans for Ingres VectorWise, produced by the team Amsterdam, I figured that there must have been some passive smoking going on   I was somewhat skeptical of the chances of a successful coupling between something as revolutionary and cutting edge as VectorWise and something as “mature” as Ingres – think Hugh Heffner and Holly Madison, but I’m happy to have been proven wrong!  Talking of Hugh Heffner maturity, you may be surprised to learn that Roy Hann, who we hope will be participating in the technology preview program, has recently hit a half century!

There’s lots of detailed information available on the web about the inner workings of Ingres VectorWise.  If you’re an existing Ingres customer or partner who is interested in joining the Ingres VectorWise Technology Preview Program then I’d encourage you to fill out the application that’s available here.

Ingres VectorWise is revolutionary – it’s a database, but not as you know it!

 

The Great Y2K Non-event

I spent the eve of the new millennium holed up in the Computer Associates Headquarters in Islandia, New York.  We’d instituted the II_DATE_CENTURY_BOUNDARY fix for Ingres well in advance of the switchover, so we had mixed emotions as we sat in the office, as the new millennium dawned across the globe, and watched nothing happen.  

Ingres - the first database available for the AMD Opteron(x86-64)
In 2002 I met with AMD and was quickly sold on their idea of extending the x86 chip-set to enable 64-bit computing.   I really liked the fact that their approach would allow native support for existing applications – a shortcoming of the rival Intel Itanium project.  We took delivery of a stack of shiny new 64-bit desktop machines and Jeremy Hankinson took responsibility for porting Ingres to this exciting new platform.   J made short work of getting the port completed and through QA and we were delighted to be highlighted as the first GA database platform for Opteron when the Opteron chip was launched in 2003. 

Emma Learns that there is such a Thing as Bad Publicity
Let’s just say that after almost a decade the “Pornography Incident” has almost disappeared from the Internet.  Whew!

Ingres Enters Open Source
In 2004 Ingres was contributed to the open source community under the CA Trusted Open Source License.   The launch was accompanied by the now infamous Ingres Million Dollar Challenge, a partnership agreement with JBoss and the availability of Plone and Zope for Ingres. 

Ingres Corporation is Formed
Ingres Corporation was formed in November 2005 and there was tremendous excitement amongst the Ingres team that was liberated from CA.   A company had to be built almost overnight around the 100 people that left CA to form Ingres Corporation, and the company has grown significantly since then in terms of size, mind-share and market-share.

Ingres 2006 Launched
One of the first engineering tasks we undertook at Ingres Corp was to re-brand the Ingres product with the Ingres Corp branding and release it under the GPL license.  One of the problems with the CA Trusted Open Source License was that nobody trusted it – despite the fact that “Trusted” was its middle-name! 

Emma re-learns the Bad Publicity Lesson
Let’s just say that Ms. McGrattan has learned never to pick a fight with the boys when she’s outnumbered 10:1.    

Ingres IceBreaker Launched
Ingres IceBreaker was an idea ahead of its time.  The idea of a truly integrated software solution was revolutionary and we spent a lot of time explaining the benefits of a software appliance long before the term was commonly understood.  Thankfully software appliances are now more popular and we have recently been invited by Novell to integrate Ingres with SUSE Studio to enable third party appliances to benefit from the rich feature set that Ingres provides.

OpenROAD Enters Open Source
In May of 2008 we completed the work required to create an open source project, named EMPIRE, for Ingres OpenROAD.   The announcement was very well received by the OpenROAD community and since then we have held a number of successful code-sprints and seen significant  community contributions to the project.

Ingres VectorWise Project Announced
I may be biased, but I believe that the announcement of the Ingres VectorWise project is the most exciting thing to happen in the database space in the past decade.   Ingres VectorWise is the first enterprise solution that will truly exploit the improvements made in chip technology over the past decade.

There were other high points of the past decade that didn’t make my list such as meeting Michael Stonebraker at The Ingres Conference, The Ingres 30 Year Anniversary at UC Berkeley, the Ingres Open Engineering Summit in the Dominican Republic, winning awards at industry trade-shows, our placing in the Forrester Wave, Rick’s Ingres book….  

If you have your own personal favourite milestones from the past decade, I’d love to hear from you.

 

It’s going to be a blue Christmas!

I woke up this morning with a dull pain in my abdomen and a throbbing headache.   A couple of Advil washed down with a strong black coffee took care of the headache, the dull pain in my abdomen is most probably my liver trying to make a run for it before the Christmas season starts in earnest.    As the fog lifted I realized that it’s just one week today to Christmas Day and I haven’t done my Christmas shopping yet.  Normally I smugly take all my wrapped Christmas presents home to Ireland  during the Thanksgiving weekend in November, but this year I’ve left shopping to the very last minute.  Like countless others I’ve had my head buried in the sand and have secretly hoped that Christmas simply wouldn’t happen this year.    

It struck me this week that this same approach has been adopted by many IT budget holders in 2009.   They’ve subconsciously hoped that by pretending that the recession doesn’t exist that it will somehow disappear.   The reality is that when they get back to work in January and review their budgets for 2010 they’re going to have to wake up to the New Economics of IT, a topic I spoke about at the Open Source In Finance Exchange in London this week.  I predict that in 2010 we will see a lot more migrations to Ingres than we saw in 2009 as more IT decision makers question paying premium prices for commodity software. 

Talking of Blue Christmases, I suspect that Tiger Woods has had better holiday seasons.   I was quoted this morning in The Register likening Google to Tiger Woods in an interview that may have the Ingres PR Team scratching their heads.   The comment was made in jest.  Google has enjoyed a squeaky clean image, much like that of Cheetah Woods, but the reality is that they’re gradually taking over our entire on-line lives in a way that we wouldn’t allow any other company to.   As well as standardizing on their search engine it’s likely that you’ve entrused your email, documents, videos and photographs to Google.  You may even trust them enough that you allow them to track your every move and broadcast your exact location to a chosen few via Google Latitude.  You may use their Chrome browser and have plans to use the Chromium operating system next year.  Many of you may be hoping that Santa delivers an Android phone this Christmas.  Some of you may plan to move your operations to their Cloud infrastructure next year.   The list is endless.   I’m cynically sitting here wondering when their “nine iron through the windshield moment” will come and enable a parade of skeletons to come waltzing out of their closet.  

On behalf of the Ingres Emerging Technologies Team I’d like to wish you and yours the very best for the holiday season!