A few years ago I  blogged about my first visit to Australia.  Australia is truly beautiful and overflowing with natural resources, and the fact that the only souvenir I brought home from my visit was a pair of kangaroo balls continues to be a source of shame.   OK I admit it, I know no shame; the souvenir is proudly displayed in my glass display case in my living room.

The Ingres 10S launch got us some press coverage in a specialist geospatial publication as well as in the trade press in Australia.  Given their abundance of natural resources, Australia presents a massive opportunity for us to provide a cost effective alternative for esri users with an eye on the bottom line.

Tyler Mitchell and I are repeating our Ingres 10S webinar in a timezone more amendable to our antipodean friends, on May 23rd.   Details and registration available here.

After living in the US for over a dozen years I’m almost fluent in the language, but I’m still taken by surprise every so often.  The latest incident was when a friend referred to me as having “a face like a map of Ireland”.   In Ireland that means that you’re so decrepit that the lines on your face resemble a map.  In the US, it apparently means that you look typically Irish – well either that or my friend, Leslie, can think very fast on her feet.

So what’s this got to do with Ingres?  Immediately before the launch of Ingres 10S I had an email from one of the guys at Rational Commerce, who was at a conference in Ireland, asking if we’d thought about using Ingres 10S in facial recognition.   While the early deployments of Ingres 10S are being used for managing utilities and natural resources, I really like the idea of using the spatial capabilities of Ingres 10S for biometrics; as I see it a face is simply a series of three dimensional coordinates.  Down the line we could couple facial recognition capabilities with the speed of Vectorwise and you can imagine the possibilities.   We’re going to take a more serious look into this when we get a chance to come up for air.  The Ingres 10S launch, and the subsequent webcast presented by myself and Tyler Mitchell, has generated quite a bit of interest in Ingres 10S, some of it from brand new prospects, and some of it from old friends like Tom Turchioe and George Merritt.

If you’d like to learn more about the spatial features added to Ingres 10S or to engage with us on a spatial project, please visit http://www.actian.com/products/ingres/geospatial or contact us at geospatial@actian.com

Dell announced a set of records for the TPC-H benchmarks today: http://dell.to/R720-TPCH

Naturally, Actian is delighted to work with Dell to establish new bests in performance (QphH) and price-performance ($/QphH) for this industry-recognized benchmark at scale factors of 100GB and 300GB on the Dell R720.

If your company has a need to take smart action on big data, take a look at Vectorwise. Visit our news section, where a number of our customers and partners have shared stories of their experience with Vectorwise including descriptions of the benefits of the performance gains and affordability of Vectorwise, and how it is the ideal data platform for companies that want to win by quickly taking smart action. Or download Vectorwise. And let us know what you think.

About the TPC-H Benchmark: TPC and the benchmark name TPC-H are registered trademarks of the Transaction Processing Performance Council. The TPC believes that comparisons of TPC-H results measured against different database sizes are misleading and discourages such comparisons.