When I talk to customers or colleagues in IT about appliance based computing, I get a couple different responses. I get the “Huh?” look. I get some futuristic absurdity that makes me re-think why I asked this person in the first place. Or, I get a slightly similar yet different definition I’m familiar with. It makes me recognize how badly we as customers and ISVs need a definition to agree on.

There are pros and cons to the early days of a definition, particularly in software. Vendors are usually guilty of twisting, turning, and manipulating a definition in order to fit their agenda. While customers grab a definition they like and apply it to their world, only to shut out potentially better technology. As more vendors & customers enter the fray, bodies get created, conferences are held, and enough mass is generated to ensure a standard is established. But this takes time and is that really needed? I’m not sure.

Good or bad, I like to go to Wikipedia as a starting point to see if a definition to a personal unknown exists. Everyone needs to place an appropriate filter on what they read and from where, but in this case, I think the Wikipedia definition of software appliances is spot on. We now have a starting point, a definition that is public, neutral, and in the open for the community to comment and shape. 20 years ago I think this battle was won by the biggest marketing budget on the block. Today, the masses and the smaller guys can get involved early and keep the marketing disinformation to a minimum.

By way of introduction, I’m a product manager at Ingres involved in managing our Appliance computing initiative with partners. We have what I think are some interesting and valuable solutions for customers and ISVs. This corner of the world is getting more interesting due to its early days, the growing number of vendors and customers adopting, and the value it provides. I hope to shed more light on what Ingres and the market are doing and why software appliances are here to stay.

Share This

I 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

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.

Share This

Today is day one at the Ingres Engineering Summit being held in Punta Cana (Dominican Republic) with a  cross section of folks from across the Ingres engineering, support/ service, Product Management teams as well as a number of contributors from the Ingres open source community.  Amazing the number of people here and the tenure they have around Ingres - I think the winner from the community has 24 years using Ingres ( he started using Ingres on VAX - wow!!) . We also have a number of newbies to Ingres from various universities and it’s great to have them here as well.

The agenda is loaded with pretty cool topics that range from demos from DMSolutions (GIS) and Ingres CAFE,  application development using Ingres CAFE and OpenROAD,  Google Summer of code work, Datallegro contributions,  open sessions with Ingres Janitor’s Project just to name a few. Lots of good debate on code repositories and various new ideas to get engaged with. I was talking with one of partners here at the Summit - Karl from Datallegro and he is speaking later and has several hundred submissions in queue.. Great job Karl. Great seeing the blog from Datallegro on line as well.

 Later this week we have a codefest planned, lots of after hours activities and yes you can’t go to Punta Cana with out some team building event - rumor is it is building a sand castle and best design wins not sure what …. That ought to be loads of fun with a bunch of really technical dbms guys.  Any hardware design guys in the house????

/deb woods

Share This

Great news from our engineering teams!  We have just posted a Beta release of Ingres 2006 Release 2 SP1 for OpenVMS Clusters.  This is a completely re-architected cluster solution for OpenVMS Alpha Clusters that provides significantly higher scalability than earlier versions of Ingres.  This version of Ingres runs on OpenVMS 8.2 and 8.3. 

Our OpenVMS engineering team  has done a terrific job implementing a new Distributed Lock Manager and putting this new release through it’s paces.  Along with providing our OpenVMS customers with this long awaited release, the team has also helped drive significant quality improvement across all our platforms with this effort.

To test drive this new beta release for OpenVMS clusters, download it at:

Share This

Yesterday was kind of a bummer for open source communities everywhere. We saw an open source company (MySQL) compromising the trust they have with their community. MySQL announced that they will only offer certain features to paying customers. Take a look at Jeremy’s blog for more commentary. They have forked their community release and one must now wonder what goes next. Building creditability is always a difficult task for one to achieve. It takes hard work every day, building innovative, robust products, adding value in everything you do, responding to customer queries, and doing what you say you will do. The latter being most important - open source is about open code. It is about sharing your work so others can contribute, use, provide feedback, etc.

At Ingres, we are working very hard to grow and build our community. We are always looking for guidance and new ideas on how to build a robust community. We have a number of activities underway with various universities, partners, customers, users and are looking for more each day. I worked at Red Hat for years where knowledge was always plentiful and we never compromised our creditability with our community. This is a trait we are building at Ingres as well. The industry has responded over the years with a strong vote of support for the open source model and it is surprising and sad to see MySQL take such a turn.

/deb woods

Share This

There is alot of activity started to brew on OpenROAD and I pulled this email from David Tondreau (Sr. Architect OpenROAD) where he shares ideas on how to get engaged with the OpenROAD project called Empire. Take a look at the new wiki for OpenROAD and get involved, there’s lots happening there and you don’t want to get left behind..

• The OpenROAD Community Wiki

The OpenROAD Community Wiki will be used to distribute news, resources and downloads related to OpenROAD. It will also form the basis for collaboration as a community. As a wiki, it is open to everyone’s participation.

• The OpenROAD Community mail list

The OpenROAD Community (openroad-community) mail list will be used to distribute news and announcements concerning developments in the OpenROAD open source community. The list will be used to announce new members, significant project events (new projects, major project announcements, etc.) as well as the availability of new resources (downloads, presentations, code examples, etc.). The list is open for anyone to subscribe however new subscribers who are not members of the OpenROAD Community will be sent a separate invitation to join the community.

• The OpenROAD Developers mail list

The OpenROAD Developer (openroad-developer) mail list supports discussions relating to OpenROAD open source projects. This discussion group is open to OpenROAD Community Members who have taken the extra step of becoming an OpenROAD Community Developer.

We encourage everyone to continue to use this mail group for general discussions relating to developing applications in OpenROAD. The additional mail groups have been set up to allow individuals to choose the groups they would like to participate in and only get e-mails that are specifically related to those interests.

/deb woods

Share This

There have been quite a few changes over at the Red Hat Exchange and in keeping up with some old friends we decided it was time to join the Exchange. Red Hat Exchange is a great place for open source companies to share information and to ‘mingle’ with other open source solutions. Customers can visit the site and get some good information about the various players in the open source space and see the solutions that are available. The Exchange first started out as a web only support offering with no Enterprise support - it just didn’t fit our model. We have worked with Red Hat on a number of key projects like building high available solutions using  the GFS clustering product as well as robust application development platforms with  JBoss, it is only natural that we sign up to the Exchange. Hope to see you guys there..

/deb woods

Share This

IPv6 is the “next generation” protocol designed by the IETF to replace the current version Internet Protocol, IP Version 4 (”IPv4″).   While IPv6 is “next generation”, for many Ingres customers, it needs to be addressed today.  One of our customers recently sent us some questions that many others may have as well.  So I decided to post my answers here as well.  If you have any additional questions or comments, please feel free to post a comment here or to send me an e-mail at Christine.Normile@ingres.com

1. Will Ingres Database support IPv6? (Y/N) If so, what product version is required? Ingres 2006 Release 2 and higher support IPv6.  IPv6 is not supported with earlier versions of the Ingres database such as version 2.6  
2. Does Ingres Database run under an OS which supports IPv6 (if applicable)? Ingres 2006 Release 2 and higher is available for a wide array of hardware and operating system platforms.  Many of these have already been IPv6 enabled.  The table below lists the platforms Ingres 2006 runs on.

3. Does Ingres Database support services or features that collect, handle, process, store, display (e.g., screen pages, printouts) any IPv4 address today (from customer, from network, from anywhere)?

·       Does Ingres Database store or forward any IP address information? Ingres stores IP information only for the duration of a session to facilitate communication between our processes and the IP address.  IP information is neither stored or forwarded by Ingres for any purpose other than support of the communications protocol.

·       Does Ingres Database have any hard-coded IPv4 addresses (e.g., for system calls)? No.

4. Is IPv6 required for Ingres Database’s network communications protocol? i.e., does the computer machine(s) hosting Ingres Database require IPv6 to communicate with customers/services/CPE machines (that will use only IPv6 addresses), or may the host machines continue to exclusively use their IPv4 addresses? (You may assume the IT network and computer machines will continue to support IPv4 within the company for a long time.)   Ingres 2006 Release 2 and higher handle mixed IPv6/IPv4 networks transparently.  Host machines can continue to exclusively use their IPv4 addresses to allow for a staged implementation of IPv6.
5. Is Ingres Database used to manage or collect data from network elements that carry IP-based traffic? Ingres 2006 can be used to manage and collect data from network elements that carry IP-based traffic.  It is, however, a general purpose relational database management system and any such use of Ingres Database would be as a result of the application using Ingres 2006.
6. Is Ingres Database impacted due to changes in devices that will only run IPv6 (e.g., CPE, Mobility devices)?  No, Ingres 2006 Release 2 and higher can support IPv6 only devices, IPv4 only devices, devices that support either IPv4 or IPv6 or any combination thereof.

For more information on IPv6 and Ingres 2006, check out Bruce Lunford’s VIP Webinar in the VIP Webinar Archive (http://www.ingres.com/customers/vip-archive.php) under Connecting with Ingres.

Share This

In case you missed Andrew Ross’ presentation on how to get started contributing to Ingres, I wanted to share the link to the webinar. You can find it in the Ingres DBMS section entitled Ingres Open Source Community. The VIP archive page has a wealth of information on how to get started with Ingres, upcoming release information and future direction. Sign up to get invites to future sessions.

Andrew does a great job walking through some of the tools that Ingres is now using to help users i.e.

• view source (LXR)

http://lxr.ingres.com

• How to create a  work area

svn co http://code.ingres.com/ingres/main~/ingres-main

• To raise a bug to the Ingres community

http://bugs.ingres.com

• Looking for more on Ingres

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.databases.ingres/topics

deb woods

Share This

So I'm trying to work a bit on the Mac OS X port of Ingres that's had a recent update and some important changes. There's a few things that don't just come "out of the box":

1. You'll have to install as root
   
   To do this the easy way, just open a term and run the command "su -". This will prompt you for your current user password to make sure that you really mean it.
    
2. You need to set DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH
   
   Mine is set to /lib:/usr/lib:/usr/local/lib:$II_SYSTEM/ingres/lib
   
   You can safely replace any directives to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH with setting DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH
    
3. You need to up your shared memory kernel settings
   
   Create the file /etc/sysctl.conf and add the following lines if you have 4G memory:
   
   kern.sysv.shmall=4096000
   
   kern.sysv.shmseg=8
   
   kern.sysv.shmmni=256
   
   kern.sysv.shmmin=1
   
   kern.sysv.shmmax=1024000000
    
4. You need to be running Leopard
   
   We know this may be a bit of a hassle, and it could be remedied with some work, but the current people working on the port are all running Leopard and we're trying to focus time on getting the port working well on Leopard first. If you're interested in helping out, please let me know!

Here's a few things I did that just make life easier based on my experience:

• Create an "ingres" user via the good old System Preferences app's Accounts section
• Install in /opt
• Permanently change my term's option for termcap interaction with the function keys to "Strict VT-100 keypad behavior" on the Advanced tab of my preferences

To make your life easy, but maybe slightly bloated, run the ingres_express_install.sh script and let it rip by. Once finished, login as the ingres user, set your env (including DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH), and create your first database:

• createdb -umsale mymacdb

Replace the msale with the username you use to do development on the local box and then that user will be able to perform DBA actions for that database. If you want to do your development/dba work as ingres, just leave out the -u option.

You can now connect to your database via the JDBC tool of your choice to interact via ANSI-friendly SQL (I use SQuirrel due to its Toad-like UI) using the JDBC driver at $II_SYSTEM/ingres/lib/iijdbc.jar.

Let us know if you have any issues with the install and we’ll do the best we can to help out. We know there is plenty of work that still needs to be done to get this port reliable and ready as a solid development platform on the Mac.

If you are a student with experience developing C or Obj-C on the Mac, we would love to get you involved in our Google Summer of Code project to get Ingres healthy on Leopard.

Share This