Two years into the Great Recession, the President announced a marked change in policy, and one we have needed since the beginning. A lasting recovery depends on one thing: jobs. Federal stimulus, to date, has benefited employees, but in industries which will provide weak returns over the long-term, I refer to Wall Street, Detroit and government.

This time I think, he’s got it:

First, we’re proposing a series of steps to help small businesses grow and hire new staff. Over the past fifteen years, small businesses have created roughly 65 percent of all new jobs in America. These are companies formed around kitchen tables in family meetings, formed when an entrepreneur takes a chance on a dream, formed when a worker decides its time she became her own boss. These are also companies that drive innovation, producing thirteen times more patents per employee than large companies. And, it’s worth remembering, every once in a while a small business becomes a big business – and changes the world.

Innovation and risk-taking on the part of small business creates jobs and a tax base to repay the enormous deficit created in the past year.

Matt Asay made some good points on the Jobs Summit, where the technology industry was represented by Eric Schmidt and Jim Whitehurst.

The Obama Administration concluded after ten months in office that unemployment above 10% and eight million jobs lost in the last two years means a lot of people are out of work. And, this administration should take action.

Focus on the economy of the 30’s is what the Summit should do, and I mean 2030 not 1930. This Administration followed the previous one  and focused on helping old companies, I mean really old and big ones.Lehman, Merrill and General Motors offered job opportunities for our grandparents and great-grandparents, but will not do the same for our children.

Heed the advice of Eric and Jim. For most people, the next job will come from a small business, less than 50 employees. Both Google and Red Hat were small businesses in our lifetimes, and continued to add jobs during this Great Recession.

Matt’s points on the economics of abundance, made two years ago, are outstanding. Ultimately, a great outcome would be a set of policies that encourage other industries, think health care and energy, to move from the 20th century model of managing scarcity to the open source and internet model of managing abundance.

Thanks Matt.

This week we’ll be concluding our podcast series on the Ingres VectorWise Project. In this section, Marcin Zukowski, VectorWise CEO, and I discuss the community aspects of Ingres VectorWise, including whether or not it will be open source and how people can start participating.

If you’d like to check out the podcast in its entirety, it can be found on Ingres.com/VectorWise under the “Resources” section. If you’re interested in getting started with Ingres to prep for VectorWise, you can download the latest version here.

Now that we’ve looked at some of the business aspects of Ingres VectorWise, it’s a great time to dive into some of the more technical features it offers.

In this part of the series, VectorWise CEO Marcin Zukowski discusses how Ingres VectorWise differs from competing solutions such as custom hardware and how this type of solution will impact the future of databases. We finish off this part by discussing how taking advantage of modern hardware will change IT as a whole.

Be sure to check in next week when we look at VectorWise, open source, and the community.

This week, Marcin Zukowski, VectorWise CEO, and I continue our podcast series on the Ingres VectorWise Project as we look at the project from a business perspective.

A couple of the things we discuss are:
·    Pain points companies have that create a need for a solution like Ingres VectorWise
·    Why VectorWise chose Ingres as a partner
·    How Ingres VectorWise can improve how you make business decisions

I hope you enjoy part two of our series – be sure to join us next week as we dive into some of the more technical aspects of the project.

A few weeks ago, Ingres was invited to the Intel Developer Forum here in San Francisco and I had the opportunity to sit down with Marcin Zukowski, CEO of VectorWise, and discuss some of the things that Ingres VectorWise is doing. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting a podcast series that addresses how Ingres VectorWise will impact technology, business, and community.

This week, we’ll be taking a look at what Ingres and VectorWise were showing at the Intel Developer Forum and why the advances Ingres VectorWise offers are so important to unlocking the power of modern hardware.

Today, we unveil the first public demonstration of the Ingres VectorWise database technology at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco. Please stop by the Advanced Technology Zone at the IDF if you are in town.

IDF is a great venue for Ingres VectorWise, as I like to say it brings the power of Moore’s Law to business software.

My experience has been that Intel delivers advances in processor and server technologies, but when the latest processor is combined with the latest business software, the software application doesn’t seem to run much faster or better. You’ve see this at home, you buy a new computer with more cores, memory and faster clock speed and load your applications on the new system. Do your applications run faster, if yes, do the improvements come anywhere close to matching the advances in the hardware? Probably not.

The Ingres VectorWise database is different. Ingres VectorWise delivers impactful and tangible improvements to business applications coincident with many of the advances which Intel delivers to the processor market. Traditional databases were designed over 20 years ago and were in tune with the server architecture of that era. Ingres VectorWise is in tune with the modern chips and server technologies.

The benefits to customers, as well as hardware and software companies, is not just that Ingres VectorWise is a faster database. Yes, Ingres VectorWise is fast and can scan millions of rows of data in seconds, and can do that on a laptop system. The more interesting thing for my discussions with prospective customers and partners is the potential for Ingres VectorWise to power applications which have not been attainable in the past. Imagine if an individual could analyze a set of information on a desktop or small server which had previously taken a rack of servers. The Library of Congress contains over 100 million items, imagine if a person could use a standard server or desktop to scan through a data set equal to the book abstracts of the entire library, in seconds – if you can imagine that then you are just beginning to see the power of bringing Moore’s Law to software applications.

Federal Reserve meets this week to set direction for the fed funds target rate. Wall Street Journal’s Mark Gongloff sees rates staying where they are. I agree with his analysis and conclusion.

Does it matter to high technology vendors? Better to watch corporate borrowings than actually the direction of rates. Companies borrow when they believe they will expand their business, and conversely a company reduces borrowings in anticipation of a business shrinking.

When rates were cut dramatically last year, companies did not necessarily borrow. Now, the Federal Reserve’s own updated data contains some good and not so good news on corporate borrowings. Nonfinancial companies have increased their borrowings back to levels not seen since 2007. Unfortunately, financial companies continue to have anemic borrowings as they deleverage their portfolios. I see it is likely the Fed needs to wait for more evidence to raise rates. More important to re-igniting growth in the economy and purchases of technology is an increase in corporate borrowings.

Today at Ingres, we announced the early results of our collaboration with VectorWise.

Don Clark at the Wall Street Journal got it and broke the story first (Ingres Claims Database Advance). The announcement focuses on technology, rather a technology innovation, which in itself is pretty cool.  Ultimately, the bigger story is the impact to users.

Ingres VectorWise technology will allow users to access data and ask questions at the “speed of thought.” Tom Berquist, our CFO, coined this term, and developed the concept from his own experiences drilling into corporate data at Ingres, and from his days as an industry analyst with Goldman Sachs.

Technology advancements allow even medium sized companies to generate millions of transaction line items, today. Yet, when the Boss asks his team the “what if” questions, today’s technology requires hours, weeks or even months to get an answer. The examples are many. Suppose a competitor introduces a promotion in the market, the Boss wants to know “if we match their promotion, what is the impact to our profitability.” Today, your answer is “let me check with IT and get back to you with a ‘date for a date’ when I will get that analysis to you.” With Ingres VectorWise, the answer is at your fingertips, and within your budget.

Ingres VectorWise aims to allows you, as business user, to leap over all the jargon of the data management technology to a place where you get answers for your business.

Stay tuned.

No surprise that people ask my opinion.

In our industry, customers buy products based on roadmap, at least that is one reason. Ingres has a roadmap, Oracle has one, IBM, Microsoft, etc. The MySQL roadmap from as recent as March 2009 has lost their roadmap, please tell me if you have seen it.

Seriously, not to offend the roadmap team at MySQL, companies which have announced an acquisition have a difficult time communicating a roadmap. Ask MySQL what will happen to the MySQL roadmap after the acquisition. Next, if you are lucky to get an answer, tell me if you believe that roadmap will be relevant after the acquisition closes. Ask yourself if Oracle will continue the development plan for MySQL on the same roadmap, or will they make the roadmap better, that is add to the MySQL product at a faster rate, so that the product is as good as, say, the Oracle database….