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 Read the rest of this entry »

When I started working at Ingres in Dublin back in 1992 one of the first projects I was assigned was to port Ingres to IBM OS/2. At that time the Windows4GL team was also undertaking an OS/2 port, and I was able to leverage much of the work that Joe Kronk, Puree Charoenpong, and the rest of the Windows4GL team had done to complete the first port of the DBMS to a desktop platform. I was curious about the Windows4GL technology and within weeks of joining Ingres I sat through an introductory Windows4GL training class. I was amazed at how quickly I could build relatively complex data-centric applications with a cool GUI interface. Read the rest of this entry »

I do dozens of press and analyst briefings each year and I’m usually pretty confident that I can handle any question that comes my way. I’ve come a long way since that time at Comdex when I declared to an audience that included a lot of press members what I would have chosen as an alternate career. More on that in a future blog.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

The MySQL conference is currently underway in Santa Clara and I’ve been watching the newswire and blogs for announcements and feedback. Yesterday I read in Jeremy Cole’s blog that Sun is holding back some vital features from the MySQL open source community, and providing those features only to their enterprise customers. Marten Mikos confirmed this and attempted to justify it in a comment posted on the blog. Regular readers of my blog will remember that in December I commented on the serious mistakes being made by Sun in open source, and this is another one that I’d add to that list. To be a little bit closed source is like being a “a little bit pregnant”. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re presently hosting the first ever Ingres Global Partner Summit in Prague and we have over 60 partners in attendance. Some of the partners who are in attendance have been Ingres partners for as long as I can remember and some, like SpagoBI, are recent additions to our partner portfolio and its been exciting to listen to our partners, new and old, share their successes.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

It was St Patrick’s Day last Monday, and I started the day feeling a little blue rather than green. I was to have spent the weekend in Dublin with my family, but instead found myself at an Eclipse Foundation board meeting in Santa Clara. I’ve recently been elected to the board of the Eclipse Foundation to represent the add-in provider community which includes Ingres and our friends at Laszlo and Red Hat. It was an insightful meeting and getting the opportunity to meet 1200 Eclipse Developers meant that EclipseCon was definitely worth sacrificing my planned St Patrick’s Day in Dublin. Read the rest of this entry »