Ingres Engineering Summit - From the user side ….
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008I saw this post on one of the Ingres mailing list and thought others might be interested in hearing what Roy Hann (UK IUA President) had to say about the recent Ingres Engineering Summit .—-Original Message—–From: Roy Hann
Sent: Wednesday, 30 April 2008 2:51 AM
Subject: [Info-Ingres] Ingres Engineering Summit
Nobody has yet posted any report of the Ingres Engineering Summit anywhere, so I thought I’d report a few bits and pieces that captured my attention.
First of all, it was an open event, as befits an open source company.
Anyone was welcome to attend and a great many partners (and others) did. I don’t know the total headcount but considering it was a moderately expensive week and a long time out of the office, it was very well attended. I’d guess there were well over 100 people there.
The amount of openness demonstrated was impressive. It wasn’t just about exposing the code, it was also about exposing the thinking, the working practices, the people, and–yes–the tensions. With the exception of a one-hour slot that was employees-only, everything was out in the open.
Anyone who didn’t attend has missed out on a lot. Plan to attend next year.
Just running through the agenda from top to bottom, and focussing just on Ingres rather than OpenROAD, here are some highlights:
Andrew Ross did a one hour presentation that covered a lot of ground on the general theme of “community development”, and more precisely, the barriers to community development and what has to change to make it easier/possible.
As we all know, there was a lot standing in our way, and there is a long way to go still. However the need for a properly open process was as taken as given. As well as reporting a lot of progress with things like http://code.ingres.com (Subversion code repository), http://lxr.ingres.com (code cross-referencer), and http://bugs.ingres.com (bug tracking), Andrew also outlined a number of as-yet unresolved problems. I think I’ll leave it to Andrew to elaborate on those, but the big one (IMO) is the communication channels. Mike Sale, Mike Leo and I have been discussing this too. One thing we agree on is that the current phpBB-based Ingres forums are an embarrassment and have to go (real soon if I have my way). Mike Leo’s suggestion of using vBulletin turns out to be top of the list at Ingres too, so that could happen fairly quickly. There are several benefits to vBulletin but the big one is that it will allow us to have a single community delivered via web pages, e-mail, or NNTP, so that we can accommodate everyone’s way of working. IRC will of course remain separate.Another big item from Andrew’s presentation is that there are actually two fairly successful virtual development systems about ready for delivery. We should be able to get our hands on these within a week or so.I won’t dwell on the rest of the presentations in such detail. You can infer the significance of these topics appearing on the agenda as well as I can.We had a number of demos of things like Ingres Café and some OpenGIS software. There was a presentation from Gordon Thorpe on the formidable challenge of re-architecting GCA. Hugh Darwen spoke about Project D (an implementation of Tutorial D on top of Ingres) and earned himself the second prize for Best Presentation. We had two presentations on column stores, one of which went on to win the first prize Best Presentation (Marcin Zukowski on Monet/x100). Karl spoke fluently about something or other for an hour and many of us marvelled. Mike Touloumtzis led a discussion about how to implement column encryption; nothing was decided but a lot of ground was explored. Steve Ball and Alison Stillway led another discussion on how to implement MVCC and which model of MVCC to adopt; nothing was decided except that a design document will be drafted for public comment. (To my mind this may be the most immediately and widely useful enhancement that popped up on the new-features radar.) Emma McGrattan picked up where Andrew Ross left off. The big thing in her presentation was the carefully expressed and several-times repeated instruction that Ingres Corp requires all its personnel to devote 10% of their time to community projects (i.e. 1/2 day per week). That is a lot of effort folk! After Emma, Kai-Uwe Sattler talked about some research into making Ingres more autonomous and self-tuning (including the ability to recommend secondary indices and statistics). There were two presentations on two different replicators from partner companies. Roger Whitcomb told us about the work he’s been doing on Ingres Management Tools, which was really good stuff. (I was present at the meeting where VDBA was first unveiled back circa 1995 and it was greeted with horror and revulsion then, and nothing has changed. Roger’s work is definitely going in the right direction this time.) After this I stepped out of server-land and saw Daryl Monge discussing Ruby on Rails. For some reason every head in the room turned to look at me when he reminded us that RoR requires every table to have a synthetic integer key. Evidently everyone understands this is wicked and wrong and that they should feel guilty about it, but equally evidently people are just going to go on doing it anyway. That was enough for me, so I retreated back to server-land again after that.
So there you are. I saw fewer than half the presentations, so perhaps someone else will comment on the others.
Finally , I am hoping to get at least a couple of these repeated at the IUA conference on June 17 in London. Please let me know if there is anything above that particularly takes your fancy and I will see what I can do.
Roy
