Planet Ingres

Andrew Ross - Step by step: configuring asterisk to enable call recording

2010-02-09T02:13:09+00:00

This is the third in our series on Asterisk. This article will cover enabling asterisk to record calls. You may want this to interview people over the phone, podcast, or some other purpose. Read on.

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Grant Croker - Ingres Administration Tools Webcast

2010-02-08T17:49:44+00:00

Later this week Roger Whitcomb will be hosting two webcasts exposing Ingres’ strategy for developing an administration tool for Ingres. The webcasts are scheduled for 7am and 4pm Pacific Standard Time on Thursday 11th Feburary. For information on joining the webcasts see the post in the Community Forums.

Andrew Ross - Flash and Twitter are open, aren't they?

2010-02-08T13:59:10+00:00

In the past, we've been given feedback that as an organization supporting open source and open standards we should not use certain technologies. Adobe flash, and Adobe Air have been two notable examples of this. For some, this issue is black or white... if you want to reach people on the web, flash is a big part of doing so. Conversely, those advocating open standards note the risks and damage caused by using technologies encumbered by patents and royalties and thus push strongly for free alternatives. It is thus interesting to see what Adobe has to say on the matter. Read on.

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Ingres Tech Blog - Developing with PHP/ Zend

2010-02-05T17:26:30+00:00

There is alot of great work going on in the Zend community and we recently have made some good connections there. With more and more PHP development going on it is no surprise to see the success happening in the Zend community. Zend recently published they have over 27,000 customers taking advantage of their technology. Great job guys!

The Zend Developer Zone is a great source of information and we recently listed EasyIngres as a project to get involved there as well. If you’re working with Ingres and PHP, here’s a good page to help get you started.

Teresa King - What’s Happening with the Ingres JDBC Driver?

2010-02-05T16:36:01+00:00

The Ingres JDBC team has busy working on new features in the Ingres JDBC Driver for Ingres 10 release. Enhancments include:

Adding Support for the following JDBC 4.0 API features:
- Automatic loading of java.sql.Driver
- National Character Set Conversion Support
- Enhances Support for BLOB and CLOB
- Wrapper pattern
- New Scalar Functions
- SQLException enhancements
- JDBC API changes to existing JDBC interfaces
- SQL/XML and XML support
- Connection Management

For more information on the Ingres support of the JDBC 4.0 API features, see JDBC 4.0 API Features Implemented.

A Community Preview of the Ingres JDBC Driver (iijdbc.jar) can be found at Community Preview Download Area.

Boolean Data Type Support.

For more information regarding Ingres’s support of the Boolean Data Type, see Boolean Data Type Support.

A Community Preview of the Ingres JDBC Driver (iijdbc.jar) will be available in the future that exposes this support. An Ingres 10 DBMS and Data Access Server (DAS) are a must to exploit this feature.

Batch Execution Support.

Batch processing (batch execution actually) is currently supported in the Ingres JDBC Driver but under the covers statements are not actually batched but instead are done as Singleton queries which undermine the performance improvement expected when batching queries. The feature was implemented in this manner due to the lack of support in the Ingres DBMS for batch processing. With Ingres 10, the DBMS will be adding capabilities to handle batch processing and the JDBC Driver will be modified to take advantage of the new Batch feature. This enhancement should significantly improve batch processing in the Ingres JDBC Driver.

For more information regarding Ingres’s support of Batch Execution in Ingres 10 and the JDBC Driver, see Batch Statement Execution Performance.

A Community Preview of the Ingres JDBC Driver (iijdbc.jar) will be available in the future that exposes this support. An Ingres 10 DBMS and Data Access Server (DAS) are a must to exploit this feature.

Future blog entries will discuss new updates to the JDBC Driver and Community Previews of the new functionality.

Eva Wong - UCOSP status report #2

2010-02-05T09:46:44+00:00

For the past 2 weeks, I have been working with the first 2 patches, issimple and isempty, with the first one committed and second one pending for approval. These patches are compiled based on the latest from the GEOS library repository after the people working on it fixed the building issue, and applied the patch sent by my mentor Alex Trofast.

Next moving on, I'm going to work closely with Sara on the SEP testing and hopefully and compile a set of steps for newbies to QA for Ingres.

Wiki pages that I have been reading about.
http://community.ingres.com/wiki/Test_Developer
http://community.ingres.com/wiki/SEPGUIDE

Eva Wong - UCOSP code sprint day #2

2010-02-05T08:59:00+00:00

Today we continue to explore the unanswered questions left over from yesterday. These are the things that I have explored

OGC stands for opengeospatial consortium, and GEOS is an implementation of the OGC specification. It is formed by a set of companies who have invested their time to have set out a standard for geospatial information systems and databases. GEOS implements part of the SFS standard and Ingres uses it for geospatial manipulation and calculation. The patch Alex sent sends me extends GEOS to support more of the standard so that Ingres can use the GEOS.

Functions instances to implement:

IsSimple,
IsEmpty,
Overlaps,
X(on points only),
Y(on points only),
NumPoints (on linestring only)

Files to change:

adgoptab.roc
fi_defn.txt
aduint.h
adfops.h
adupoint.c
adffiids.h

Following the standard that is quoted from OpenGIS Implementation Specification for Geographic information - Simple feature access:
Organization: Open Geospatial Consortium Inc.
Date: 2005-11-22
Reference number of this document: OGC 05-134
Version: 1.1.0
Category: OpenGIS® Implementation Specification
Editor: Keith Ryden

SQL functions on type Geometry
IsEmpty(g Geometry) : Integer
The return type is Integer, with a return value of 1 for TRUE, 0 for FALSE, and –1 for UNKNOWN corresponding to a function invocation on NULL arguments.
TRUE if this geometric object corresponds to the empty set

IsSimple(g Geometry): Integer
The return type is Integer, with a return value of 1 for TRUE, 0 for FALSE, and –1 for UNKNOWN corresponding to a function invocation on NULL arguments.
TRUE if this geometric object is simple, as defined in the Geometry Model

SQL functions that test spatial relationships
Overlaps(g1 Geometry, g2 Geometry) : Integer
The return type is Integer, with a return value of 1 for TRUE, 0 for FALSE, and –1 for UNKNOWN corresponding to a function invocation on NULL arguments.
TRUE if the intersection of g1 and g2 results in a value of the same dimension as g1 and g2 that is different from both g1 and g2 Integer

SQL functions on type Point
X(p Point) : Double Precision
return the x-coordinate of Point p as a double precision number

Y(p Point) : Double Precision
return the y-coordinate of Point p as a double precision number

SQL functions on type LineString
NumPoints(l LineString) : Integer
return the number of Points in the LineString

Teresa King - How to Locate Information About the Ingres JDBC Driver?

2010-02-04T17:48:22+00:00

Ever wonder how to find more information on the Ingres JDBC Driver? There is quite a bit of information on the Ingres Community Wiki relating to the Ingres JDBC Driver and using Java with Ingres.

Most of this information is centrally located at Ingres Java Development Center. We try to ensure all content on the wiki related to Java and Ingres can be accessed from this main page. I’m sure we don’t manage to link up everything but we do try.

A summary of the type of information that can be found here follows.

The minimum JRE needed for a particular JDBC Driver version.

Accessible from this page are:

• Articles relating to using Java with Ingres and integration of Ingres with Java Applications and Application Servers such as JBoss, Apache Tomcat, Weblogic, and Glassfish. To directly check out all articles see Ingres Java Articles.
• Coding samples relating to using new Ingres features from Java. To directly check out all coding samples see Ingres Java Coding Samples.
• Presentations around Java and Ingres. To directly check out all coding samples see Ingres Java related presentations.

More recently the section was updated to clearly document what features where introduced in what JDBC Driver version as well as a comprehensive list of what bugs were addressed in what JDBC patch version.

We are always looking to add new content to the wiki and encourage you to submit ideas for new content or add new content yourself.

Outside of the Community wiki, the Connectivity Guide in the Ingres product documentation is the base reference resource for the JDBC driver.

Questions can always be posted to the Driver Forum.

Feedback is always welcome.

Chinese Puzzle - Button clicks do nothing in Ingres Database Workbench, Eclipse and its derivatives

2010-02-04T11:01:41+00:00

On some distributions of Linux when running Eclipse and applications derived from Eclipse the buttons on dialogs whilst accepting clicks do not seem to do anything.

After some minutes of frustration and even more minutes searching for an answer on Google I found this https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=291257 Any way the temporary solution is to set the environment variable GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS to 1 before invoking the Eclipse launcher. For example, use a script that implements the following:

#!/bin/sh export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 /usr/local/Eclipse/eclipse/eclipse

Another workaround would be to try using the keyboard’s space bar to make a button selection, but this gets a bit tedious.

Alternatively wait patiently for the advent of 3.6.

Andrew Ross - open source database ten times faster than closed source rivals

2010-02-02T14:43:49+00:00

This story is very interesting given it's significance from both an open and closed source perspective given the high performance and disruptive potential involved.

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Ingres Tech Blog - Innovations in BI

2010-01-27T14:26:48+00:00

Ingres Vectorwise continues to break speed records and early indications look strong for this project. The team is working hard as they launched the Technology Preview Program this week. The Technology Preview Program is an excellent opportunity to get first hand experience with Ingres Vectorwise and see what this technology can do for your BI solutions. Signing up for the Technology Preview Program is easy and it’s a great opportunity to help provide direction for the project.

The team is very open to suggestions and it’s a great time to get engaged to help drive this project forward. We would love to hear what you have to say about the project and your ideas for future product improvements.

/deb

Emma McGrattan - It’s a database Jim, but not as you know it!

2010-01-26T16:55:48+00:00

Earlier today we announced the Ingres VectorWise technology preview program which gives our partners and customers an opportunity to kick the tires on an early version of the product, while the engineering team holds it breath and hopes that the doors don’t fall off. To be fair to the Ingres VectorWise team my emerging technologies guys have been playing with Ingres VectorWise for a couple of months now and are completely blown away by its performance and impressed with the stability of the product.

Many of us in Ingres Engineering have spent more years than we’d care to admit working with database technologies and have seen database trends, such as object-relational databases, come and go, so there was some healthy skepticism about the VectorWise project’s chance for success. Having lived through the Jasmine project at CA we learned that bolting two pieces of database technologies together isn’t easy and that the results aren’t always pretty.

I’ll admit that when I saw the initial project plans for Ingres VectorWise, produced by the team Amsterdam, I figured that there must have been some passive smoking going on I was somewhat skeptical of the chances of a successful coupling between something as revolutionary and cutting edge as VectorWise and something as “mature” as Ingres – think Hugh Heffner and Holly Madison, but I’m happy to have been proven wrong! Talking of Hugh Heffner maturity, you may be surprised to learn that Roy Hann, who we hope will be participating in the technology preview program, has recently hit a half century!

There’s lots of detailed information available on the web about the inner workings of Ingres VectorWise. If you’re an existing Ingres customer or partner who is interested in joining the Ingres VectorWise Technology Preview Program then I’d encourage you to fill out the application that’s available here.

Ingres VectorWise is revolutionary – it’s a database, but not as you know it!

Eva Wong - UCOSP status report #1

2010-01-23T13:21:53+00:00

For the first week, I have tried stepped through the code in Ingres using the build that is generated by ./runbuild.sh -g after a clean along with gcc.

For the first patch isempty, I have the diff patch that I have so far to Andrew, Alex, and Sara. I have got a confirmation from Alex that the patch Right now I'm currently stuck on some build error that is at this point unknown to me.

I have followed the exact same steps for this way of clean build.

In $ING_ROOT:
rm -rf release install build logs tools
./runbuild.sh -c
cd src
rm -rf `svn stat | grep ? | awk '{ print $2'`
runbuild.sh -g

However, the build gave me the following error
grep --color -n error ./logs/jam_01_23_10_0309.log
1384:/data/g7iwwong/geospatial/src/common/adf/adg/adgoptab.c:1106: error: 'ADO_ISEMPTY_CNT' undeclared here (not in a function)
1385:/data/g7iwwong/geospatial/src/common/adf/adg/adgoptab.c:1106: error: 'ADZ_ISEMPTY_FIIDX' undeclared here (not in a function)

Andrew Ross - 2009 annual report

2010-01-20T15:35:43+00:00

I meant to post this earlier but was hit with a nasty cold bug that clobbered me - the good news was my hair wasn't infected. The bad news was nearly everything else was.

This is a brief retrospective of what FOSSLC did in 2009, and a look forward to 2010.

Our original goals for 2009 were:

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Andrew Ross - What I have learned about creating an open source community (so far)

2010-01-20T15:18:46+00:00

Like many of you who will take the time to read this, I have spent the last decade or so using great software from open source projects. I chuckle when I think of the weekends I lost in the early days fighting to get my XF86Config file tweaked just so, get my new network card working with bleeding edge code, or squeeze out that last drop of performance from my creaky old computer. Along the way I found I was drawn to learn from experiences building and nurturing community. I enjoyed writings and talks from people like Linus Torvalds, Mike Milinkovich, and many others since. I have learned a lot from them and developed a very healthy respect for what they do. They are the masters who make a complicated job of community/ecosystem building look easy. I wanted to share some lessons learned thus far from my own modest efforts, or at the very least, a few thoughts I consider important stated in my own words.

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Eva Wong - UCOSP code sprint day #3

2010-01-18T14:45:28+00:00

Today both the Geotools and Ingres group continued to explored the unanswered questions in their heads. We also had an hour of wrap up after lunch on what's good/bad about this meeting up.

I found the code sprint well-organized and yet elastic to different needs for different groups. I have also learnt more about the different curriculum from different schools, their strength and weakness. I am also able to get most of the discussion about sync'ing the knowledge among the team, the flow of the term, contacts, communication channel and job allocation done at this code sprint, which will definitely ease my work for the rest of the term.

Schedule of this term total = 11 weeks

Meeting: Every Friday
Where: GTalk/Skype/Google Wave
Blogs: Update 1 summarized blogpost to UCOSP per week after the meeting

Week 1(22 Jan 2010): Eva: figure out how to debug the code, and complete the 1st patch: isEmpty. See Ingres in debugging mode in action(attach gcc and run on top of Ingres?). Sara: figure out how to add test cases, how the connections are made in between the test_suite and the ingres geospatial code base, structure of the test suite for geospatial, what are the files that are needed to be modified in order to test the functions that Eva writes.
Week 2(29 Jan 2010): the 2nd patch: IsEmpty
Week 3(5 Feb 2010): testing of the first 2 patches
Week 4(12 Feb 2010): the 3rd patch: Overlaps
Week 5(19 Feb 2010): the 4th patch: NumPoints
Week 6(26 Feb 2010): testing of the 3rd, 4th patches
Week 7(5 Mar 2010): ----
Week 8(12 Mar 2010): the 5th patch: X
Week 9(19 Mar 2010): the 6th patch: Y
Week 10(26 Mar 2010): testing of the 5th, 6th patches
Week 11(2 Apr 2010): Video of seeing the SQL running in action

Eva Wong - UCOSP code sprint day #1

2010-01-18T13:03:12+00:00

Today Andrew started off the day with explaining to the group of Ingres UCOSP students the general overview picture of how a user at the browser level, Tomcat, GEOServer/Map Server, Geotools and Ingres DMBS fit together. It's decided that the 4 students from University of Waterloo and University of British Columbia work on the Geotools communication with the Ingres DBMS, and that me working on the implementation of SQL functions while Sara test them out.

We have also decided the goal of the code sprint for the Geotools group to figure out where the code that need to be modified sit, what are the road blocks, and what is the schedule of the work for the rest of the team. It's clear for the Ingres SQL group what need to be done, so the goal of the code sprint will be having 1 patch completed and if not, what is the road block to it and the schedule fo the work for the rest of the team.

We had pizza lunch and I met with some sponsors who is those that support us financially. I have also talked in person to some other graduate students and professors who I have been talking to on IRC/mailing list in previous term, and they are working on the analysis of the performance of Ingres. Hope that I can learn more from them/together for this semester!

Eva Wong - Yay, SQL implementation in action!

2010-01-17T15:38:27+00:00

I am always interested in coding and stepping through the code in a DBMS in action and my dreams have finally come true!

As a continuation of the work that I have been doing from last term, other than the error handling of the SQL functions, this semester it's clear that I will be implementing 6 SQL functions embedded in Ingres using the GEOS library with my mentor Alex Trofast.

Eva Wong - I'm back with Ingres again

2010-01-17T15:23:01+00:00

After spending a semester with the Ingres community, I have decided to stay with the team for another semester with Andrew Ross and the Geospatial team.

Other than me, this time we also have Sara Castaneda Danaher(University of Virgin Islands) as a returning student, Lim Goh(University of Waterloo), Xiaoxiao Li(University of Waterloo), Henry Chow(University of British Columbia), and Anthony McCallum(University of British Columbia).

I'm already looking forward to the code sprint that will be 2 weeks from now :)

Emma McGrattan - Ingres through the Noughties

2010-01-13T15:36:05+00:00

As we enter a new decade, I thought it might be fun to look back on some of the Ingres milestones of the last decade.

The Great Y2K Non-event

I spent the eve of the new millennium holed up in the Computer Associates Headquarters in Islandia, New York. We’d instituted the II_DATE_CENTURY_BOUNDARY fix for Ingres well in advance of the switchover, so we had mixed emotions as we sat in the office, as the new millennium dawned across the globe, and watched nothing happen.

Ingres - the first database available for the AMD Opteron(x86-64)
In 2002 I met with AMD and was quickly sold on their idea of extending the x86 chip-set to enable 64-bit computing. I really liked the fact that their approach would allow native support for existing applications – a shortcoming of the rival Intel Itanium project. We took delivery of a stack of shiny new 64-bit desktop machines and Jeremy Hankinson took responsibility for porting Ingres to this exciting new platform. J made short work of getting the port completed and through QA and we were delighted to be highlighted as the first GA database platform for Opteron when the Opteron chip was launched in 2003.

Emma Learns that there is such a Thing as Bad Publicity
Let’s just say that after almost a decade the “Pornography Incident” has almost disappeared from the Internet. Whew!

Ingres Enters Open Source
In 2004 Ingres was contributed to the open source community under the CA Trusted Open Source License. The launch was accompanied by the now infamous Ingres Million Dollar Challenge, a partnership agreement with JBoss and the availability of Plone and Zope for Ingres.

Ingres Corporation is Formed
Ingres Corporation was formed in November 2005 and there was tremendous excitement amongst the Ingres team that was liberated from CA. A company had to be built almost overnight around the 100 people that left CA to form Ingres Corporation, and the company has grown significantly since then in terms of size, mind-share and market-share.

Ingres 2006 Launched
One of the first engineering tasks we undertook at Ingres Corp was to re-brand the Ingres product with the Ingres Corp branding and release it under the GPL license. One of the problems with the CA Trusted Open Source License was that nobody trusted it – despite the fact that “Trusted” was its middle-name!

Emma re-learns the Bad Publicity Lesson
Let’s just say that Ms. McGrattan has learned never to pick a fight with the boys when she’s outnumbered 10:1.

Ingres IceBreaker Launched
Ingres IceBreaker was an idea ahead of its time. The idea of a truly integrated software solution was revolutionary and we spent a lot of time explaining the benefits of a software appliance long before the term was commonly understood. Thankfully software appliances are now more popular and we have recently been invited by Novell to integrate Ingres with SUSE Studio to enable third party appliances to benefit from the rich feature set that Ingres provides.

OpenROAD Enters Open Source
In May of 2008 we completed the work required to create an open source project, named EMPIRE, for Ingres OpenROAD. The announcement was very well received by the OpenROAD community and since then we have held a number of successful code-sprints and seen significant community contributions to the project.

Ingres VectorWise Project Announced
I may be biased, but I believe that the announcement of the Ingres VectorWise project is the most exciting thing to happen in the database space in the past decade. Ingres VectorWise is the first enterprise solution that will truly exploit the improvements made in chip technology over the past decade.

There were other high points of the past decade that didn’t make my list such as meeting Michael Stonebraker at The Ingres Conference, The Ingres 30 Year Anniversary at UC Berkeley, the Ingres Open Engineering Summit in the Dominican Republic, winning awards at industry trade-shows, our placing in the Forrester Wave, Rick’s Ingres book….

If you have your own personal favourite milestones from the past decade, I’d love to hear from you.

Ingres Tech Blog - BI – Making it the Open Source Way

2010-01-12T13:47:57+00:00

It was great to read the post this am where Brian Gentile, Japsersoft CEO, announced Jaspersoft 3.7. This release brings a number of key features to the market and shows how BI tools are continuing to grow. Sure he talked about all the cool features that the product brings to market like in-memory analysis, charts and graphs made with Adobe flash but the real news in this was how Jaspersoft has figured out how to work the open source model.

Jaspersoft has done a great job in working with partners and shared that half their paid subscriptions come from this channel. He talks about how Jaspersoft is delivered in software appliances and to deliver services in the cloud, both from partners. We at Ingres are strong partners with Jaspersoft and can attest to the energy from the team and the interest from the market.

Jaspersoft has chosen an open source model where they release a community version of the product for users to take advantage of while they reserve selected features for paying customers. This model works well for Jaspersoft and coupled with their strong partnering capabilities have led them to being cash-flow positive. It is delicate balance that the guys at Jaspersoft admit they have to watch carefully but this dual- distribution model is certainly working for this BI startup.

Being in open source for the last 10 years, it’s great to see success from other open source companies and I’m always interested in the business models behind them.

Ingres Tech Blog - Why you should join Open Source for America

2009-12-28T20:08:35+00:00

Tom Rabon and I continued our discussion with more information about Open Source for America , the organization, vision for 2010 and how members can get involved. The organization has made significant strides this year in growing it’s membership to over 1200 with numerous working groups. It’s a great organization to get involved with and has lots of opportunity for members to contribute.

Part III of the podcast focus on the Open Source for America organization and it’s vision for the future.

Take a listen and check out the organization.

The entire podcast is listed below.

/deb

Andrew Ross - Site updated

2009-12-26T16:41:42+00:00

We have updated the site to the latest version of drupal and latest patches including for contributed models. We tested the site and everything seems ok. If you notice anything amiss, please contact us through commenting here. Thank you.

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Ingres Tech Blog - Can more be done to encourage open source in Government?

2009-12-24T20:06:23+00:00

Tom Rabon and I continued our discussion around open source use in government applications and what more was possible. It has been most encouraging to see all the openess and transparency efforts underway by the Obama administration and part II of this podcast continues to share these ideas.

Take a listen and let us know about other examples of ideas where you see open source being utilized in government applications around the globe.

/deb

Ingres Tech Blog - Views from Open Source for America

2009-12-23T20:01:17+00:00

I had the opportunity recently to talk with Tom Rabon, EVP Corporate Affairs, about some of the recent activity with open source in and around the US government. In case you haven’t met Tom, he is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to government relations and has been furthering the open source cause for government at Red Hat. He is part of the original brain trust that help found Open Source for America . Tom agreed to participating in a podcast to share his ideas and some of the interesting things going on with OSfA.

Take a listen to Part I below as Tom discusses the recent DOD Memorandum, recent use of open source in government and GOSCON .

/deb

Ingres Tech Blog - Tidbits for your Stockings

2009-12-22T15:46:20+00:00

I am always impressed with the wealth of knowledge that the Ingres team pulls together and this is no exception. Last week the team had an opportunity to host a workshop and help new users get started on various open source projects. As a result Michael Flower who is responsible for Educational Services here at Ingres created some nice wiki pages to help users get started. Topics such as how to Install Ingres , How to create a database in Ingres, and How to import data to Ingres are all recent additions to the wiki with complete instructions and screen shots. Check them out and let us know other topics you would like to see more information on.

For a more complete list of information to help get you started the community wiki is the place to visit.

Nikos Vaggalis - What I gained from Open Source

2009-12-22T08:41:00+00:00

Nikos Vaggalis - Unrar Extract and Recover 1.4 released

2009-12-20T07:08:00+00:00

Emma McGrattan - It’s Going to be a Blue Christmas!

2009-12-18T13:54:42+00:00

: It’s going to be a blue Christmas!

I woke up this morning with a dull pain in my abdomen and a throbbing headache. A couple of Advil washed down with a strong black coffee took care of the headache, the dull pain in my abdomen is most probably my liver trying to make a run for it before the Christmas season starts in earnest. As the fog lifted I realized that it’s just one week today to Christmas Day and I haven’t done my Christmas shopping yet. Normally I smugly take all my wrapped Christmas presents home to Ireland during the Thanksgiving weekend in November, but this year I’ve left shopping to the very last minute. Like countless others I’ve had my head buried in the sand and have secretly hoped that Christmas simply wouldn’t happen this year.

It struck me this week that this same approach has been adopted by many IT budget holders in 2009. They’ve subconsciously hoped that by pretending that the recession doesn’t exist that it will somehow disappear. The reality is that when they get back to work in January and review their budgets for 2010 they’re going to have to wake up to the New Economics of IT, a topic I spoke about at the Open Source In Finance Exchange in London this week. I predict that in 2010 we will see a lot more migrations to Ingres than we saw in 2009 as more IT decision makers question paying premium prices for commodity software.

Talking of Blue Christmases, I suspect that Tiger Woods has had better holiday seasons. I was quoted this morning in The Register likening Google to Tiger Woods in an interview that may have the Ingres PR Team scratching their heads. The comment was made in jest. Google has enjoyed a squeaky clean image, much like that of Cheetah Woods, but the reality is that they’re gradually taking over our entire on-line lives in a way that we wouldn’t allow any other company to. As well as standardizing on their search engine it’s likely that you’ve entrused your email, documents, videos and photographs to Google. You may even trust them enough that you allow them to track your every move and broadcast your exact location to a chosen few via Google Latitude. You may use their Chrome browser and have plans to use the Chromium operating system next year. Many of you may be hoping that Santa delivers an Android phone this Christmas. Some of you may plan to move your operations to their Cloud infrastructure next year. The list is endless. I’m cynically sitting here wondering when their “nine iron through the windshield moment” will come and enable a parade of skeletons to come waltzing out of their closet.

On behalf of the Ingres Emerging Technologies Team I’d like to wish you and yours the very best for the holiday season!

Nikos Vaggalis - Unrar Extract and Recover 1.3 beta

2009-12-18T09:19:00+00:00

Nikos Vaggalis - Archive::Unrar 1.1 released

2009-12-18T09:14:00+00:00

Fred Gallagher - President’s Job Speech is Right On

2009-12-12T21:43:19+00:00

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 [...]

Eva Wong - Screencast showing building GEOS and Geospatial as a non-root user in action on Linux

2009-12-11T20:24:42+00:00

The following video is done with GEOS 3.2.0, compiled in gcc 4.3 and g++ 4.3 on Debian as a non root user.

Eva Wong - UCOSP: 2009 fall term final thoughts

2009-12-10T21:32:38+00:00

It was a valuable experience to work on the Ingres Geospatial project along with the community. The most valuable ones are not those that I got from the coding, but the co-operation, management, and more importantly, my weakness.

This project is challenging to me since I am the only University of Toronto student working with Ingres and one of the very few UCOSP students who have been grouped with a partner who is not under the same university. In order to co-operate well, I need to know more about the expectation from students at that university from which my partner is in, need to understand more about their work load level, schedules of the semester, etc, which is totally different from the group projects/assignments that I have ever done.

Although it was upsetting when I have not heard anything from my assigned partner until the end of term, because of that I caught the valuable chance to co-operate with other Ingres students as well as the community, and made myself comfortable with the style of the day to day working experience at Ingres.

I would give myself a grade 80 out of 100, with the reasons as follows.

Things that went went well

Get myself to be familiar by the Ingres community at IRC, which always guide me back to the right track when I went side ways.
Let the Ingres community see the scope of work that Andrew has assigned each of us to when the grading scheme is finalized such that the community has a better picture about the UCOSP students.
Attended most of the meetings and updated Andrew and/or my mentors whenever there's news from me.
Helped out with the other UCOSP students who are also under Ingres the best that I can, either on IRC or skype.
Kept track of and jotted down the solution to the roadblocks that I encounter during the installation and configurations stage, also some cheat sheets for newbies like me to refer to understand the bigger picture more.
Organized meetings with UCOSP students at their needs to update each other when normal meetings are cancelled.
Updated several wiki pages which had parts that are irrelevant/outdated as I digged deeper about Geospatial.

Things that could have done better

Should have contacted Andrew discussing about the organization of the course back in the summer.
Although I have mentioned to the Ingres community, but I should have raised the concern about non-responsive partner to the school earlier.
Should have better time mangagement, especially at peaks of assignments/midterms/exams.

After this term, I am more assure of my interest about project management and software architectural design, as well as about my abilities and weakness.

Andrew Ross - Call for conference hosting proposals - open source summercamp 2010

2009-12-04T16:38:42+00:00

Each year, FOSSLC has been running a conference to bring together community, academia, industry, and government for a couple of days to learn about great open source technology and concepts. We would like to call for proposals to host an event in the summer 2010. Read on for details.

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Fred Gallagher - New Economics and The Jobs Summit

2009-12-04T16:17:22+00:00

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 [...]

Grant Croker - Maven driver repository updated

2009-12-03T15:02:23+00:00

Following on from my earlier post, a new JDBC driver has been published to our external Maven repository by Alan Raison. In the next 24 hours the updated driver will be propagated to the central Maven repostory. For more information about obtaining the Ingres JDBC driver using Maven see Alan’s original post.

Grant Croker - New Ingres Ruby driver and Rails adapter posted

2009-12-03T12:44:21+00:00

It’s been a quiet few months here on the blog, however it’s been any but quiet in the office. Since my last update I’ve been busy updating the Ingres Ruby driver and Ruby on Rails adapter to support multiple connections as well as Rails/ActiveRecord 2.3.x (2.3.5 was released this week). For a complete run down of the changes made take a look at the CHANGELOG. See my forum post for more information regarding downloading the source or the pre-built binaries for Windows.

Fred Gallagher - Podcast: Ingres VectorWise – The Community

2009-12-01T23:50:29+00:00

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 [...]

Chinese Puzzle - Every journey begins with a single step

2009-12-01T09:51:20+00:00

Have you ever had to create a development stack on a machine from scratch to develop on or to check out a new technology?

You have? Then you must have suffered some of the same frustrations and annoyances of ensuring that the prerequisites and dependencies of each component are satisfied; ending up with downloading some huge quantity of software. The plethora of download, installation and configuration steps required just to get to the starting point can be enough to dissuade all but the most tenacious.
The helpful people at Exadel have taken those many steps to get to the starting point and created an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) called Cloud in a box that includes all the components to create Rich Internet Applications (RIA). With an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account you can launch an instance of the image and take your first step to being productive. Read the blog post about it RIA on the Cloud with RichFaces and Ingres and register for a free account on the Exadel Web site for more detailed instructions.

Some random stuff

Grant Croker - Best Facebook Updates ever.

2009-11-26T16:33:31+00:00

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Idle thoughts

Some random posts

Andrew Ross - Microsoft deserves to make money with open source

2009-11-26T15:22:58+00:00

Is it possible for open source to be too successful?

If you talk to someone working at a company where the majority of their revenues come from software with an open source license, you'll more often than not hear the same thing, even though it is possible, it isn't easy to make money with open source. A new trend has established itself, one in which large firms use open source components for the commodity building blocks to develop their software. They can then spend less on these areas, more on areas that differentiate them, and thus be more competitive. This has much goodness, but there are potential risks. Read on.

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Eva Wong - UCOSP: status report #14

2009-11-24T18:42:51+00:00

Back on Wednesday, I have committed the "guiding patch" into the repository. I followed these steps, confirmed with the Ingres community that this is how I should be working for development:

Go to https://bugs.ingres.com/ to create a ticket as "New enhancement" for development. The ticket system is not only used for bugs, but also development purpose.
do "svn commit --username=yourUserName /path/to/file.s -m=#123456 your description", where 123456 is the ticket number that you have created
commit 1 fix/small feature at a time
after committing, send off a quick email notifying everyone that something has just committed.

Other than that, I have also been reading on this knowing more about the structure of the Ingres code.

As for my understanding now, the current development is currently focusing on improving the robustness of this following part.

adu – This is where most of the actual expression and function semantics live. ADU contains code for string functions, date functions, coercions, and more.

For the rest of the week, I'll be working closely with Chuck Thibert on the small part that he's also working on.

Andrew Ross - Help us name our open source project

2009-11-23T19:15:04+00:00

On Thursday, I posted New open source project for capturing video to announce our project.The response was great. In fact, it took down our server 4 times. Weeeh!

We then posted a screen capture image of the software running. A video is coming soon.

We would now like your help again to name the project. We've picked the best names suggested, and there were some really good ones. Please take a moment to complete the poll. The poll will close in 1 week.

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Fred Gallagher - Podcast: Ingres VectorWise – A Technical Discussion

2009-11-20T23:15:10+00:00

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 [...]

Andrew Ross - Screen capture of capture software

2009-11-20T20:38:43+00:00

The following is a screen capture of the capture software in action recording this web site. This latest iteration of the interface reads from a flat file which keeps track of speakers and talks for a given event. We found this saves fumbling and bumbling in the heat of the moment as the talk starts. Instead you pick the talk from the list. We'll likely have a balance between this and our text box approach from the previous version....perhaps a way to override the dropdown and type.Read on.

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Andrew Ross - Site has been moved to a new server

2009-11-19T19:36:40+00:00

Sorry for the inconvenience. I just got off the phone with our ISP. We have been moved to a new server that will be better able to handle the heavy traffic.

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Andrew Ross - New open source project for capturing video

2009-11-19T14:08:40+00:00

At FOSSLC, we have been recording events for nearly two years now. We have hundreds of talks available online for free from our videos library. Along the way, as a non-profit organization, we've had to get ruthlessly efficient in how we do things. The technology used to record events is a good example of this. I would like to share the history and progression regarding how we drove down the cost and size of our video recording solution by an order of magnitude in both dimensions. We'd also like to announce a new open source project. There is an audience participation aspect to this post because we need your help to name it. Read on.

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Eva Wong - UCOSP: status report #13

2009-11-18T19:39:41+00:00

I have successfully built the code checked out from Geospatial,
with the dependencies of xerces 2.8 headers, libraries, jam, pax, and pam-devel, GEOS 3.2.0 libraries on Debian as a non-root user.

As I was running runbuild.sh, I ran into problems about the build script could not pick up some libraries(GEOS, LD) on the fly. It turned out to be the case that the path variables are runtime variables, it doesn't influence the linker. In another words, the path variables tell the build script where to find libraries when then are running, while the linker varibales tell the build script where to find the library when it's linking. The most updated code is adjusted such that it simplifies the process for non-root user to compile code.

Before running runbuild.sh, a non-root user need to:

export GEOS_LOC="/path/to/geos-3.2.0rc1/lib"
export GEOS_INC="/path/to/geos-3.2.0rc1/include"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$GEOS_LOC:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Besides, if you are not using default libraries, such as using xerces 2.8 instead of 2.7, you need to put the following line to $INC_ROOT/src/tools/port/jam/bldenv

export XERCVERS=28

Chuck Thibert has provided me with a patch which comes with the adjustment for non-root users to start my first try to apply a patch. Alex Trofast and Andrew Ross also provided me with a diff that serves as a guide for me to go through the proper process of building a patch.

Now that I have already applied the patch from Chuck and successfully build Geospatial code. Next, apply the diff!

Eva Wong - A couple of notes when compiling Geospatial with GEOS, GDAL, MapServer

2009-11-15T13:09:58+00:00

I have been following this to compile Geospatial under a Debian environment. There are a couple of notes that I want to make

As of date 2009-11-15, thanks to Frank Warmerdam, the above wiki says "--with-python" under the configuration of GDAL. However, it is still not clear why the python is required for GDAL. Since MapServer does not use it, and ogr2ogr does not require it. And that python extension for GDAL picks up gcc instead of g++ when make is run and to the point of compiling c++ code.
For the configuration of Mapserver, there is a more detailed description for getting the libraries that Mapserver needs to be build on. That provides the links in 1 place where to get: --with-ogr --with-gd=/usr --with-libiconv=/usr/local --with-png=/usr --with-proj --with-php=yes -with-agg=/usr --with-freetype --with-regex=system

Eva Wong - UCOSP: status report #12

2009-11-15T12:57:42+00:00

I have talked with the system administrator, Greg, Andrew, IRC to get me enough quota for the C code to build the code.

I am right now working on the install of the components and build the Ingres code hopefully within this weekend.

Andrew Ross - Technology management/leadership - we're doing it wrong

2009-11-13T14:49:07+00:00

First, this blog is not aimed at any particular person. It was inspired based on a conversation with a former co-worker who let me know their prospective new employer actually provides training. Yes, you heard correctly! Real formal training, and not in a booming economy when massages and gourmet meals are flying around. Imagine that!

This led the conversation to management and leadership in general, irrational fears of treating people properly we'd come across in our careers, and failure to recognize how to do things right. Why was this? This is what this blog is about. Read on.

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Roger Whitcomb - Ingres DBMS Tools

2009-11-10T21:54:47+00:00

A number of people around Ingres (both inside and outside the company) have been wondering what's happening with the new Ingres DBMS Administration Tools.

The good news is that things are happening. The bad news is that they are happening slowly.

Stay tuned as I blog about what's going on over the coming months.

Ingres Tech Blog - Open Source continues to grow in Washington

2009-11-09T20:58:38+00:00

In my last post, I discussed how the White House is using open source (drupal) to build the whitehouse.gov website. This is a gread validation point for the US Government and open source and if that wasn’t enough to signal open source growth in Washington we get this guidance on open source from the DOD. This topic is getting quite a bit of press around the web from Matt Asay, Jay Lyman (451 Group) and it is welcomed news to see this guidance for open source at the DOD. One can only agree the US Government is no laggard here and is definately leading the charge.

Last week I was at GOSCON and had the opportunity to hear David Wennergren, Dep Asst SEc of Defense for Information Managmeent and Technology/ Deputy Chief Information Officer speak. Mr. Wennergren was the author for the DOD memorandum and he talked about the advantages of open source.

It was great to hear someone in the federal space talk about open source and I wanted to share some of his thoughts around on open source:

By sharing information openly, teams are able to work more efficeintly and effectively. Ideas build on other ideas and so goes the trend.
Quick and inexpensive means to deploy your application and assess your progress in real time.
Future must look like iphone apps – Where users can quickly find what they need or develop it themselves. Must be easy to plug into.
Secure Information Sharing – These two things must be managed together.
Power of the Cloud – ‘Server huggers’ must move past control and trust. The world doesn’t work in silos anymore.

These ideas aren’t new to the open source world but to hear them spoken and accepted in such a forum was great news. The time is right for open source and it looks like the US Government is helping lead the way.

/deb

Eva Wong - Running install.php of Drupal on Ingres

2009-11-06T09:58:22+00:00

There are a couple of things to be watch out for before you run the install script:

Make sure that you have enable the rewrite module in Apache. To do this, uncomment the following line in \\Apache\conf\httpd.conf
#LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
We need to make sure Drupal will be able to use the modules. To do so, make sure we have these variables set to the following values, if not, then change them:
- Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
- AllowOverride All,
- Order allow,deny
- Allow from all
Since it may take longer than 30 seconds to run the install.php, therefore, we'd better change the maximum execution time in the php.ini located in where the command php -i gives you, to the following line: max_execution_time = 120
Make sure that you have the database with the name drupal created in Ingres by the following command: createdb drupal. For Windows user, this will create a database namely drupal with the username system. The command: createdb -uyourusername drupal will create a database with the DBA -uyourusername. By default, for Windows user, createdb -uyourusername drupal, where yourusername is not your windows account name, then you need to type destroydb -usystem drupal or destroydb -uyourusername drupal to delete the database

While you are installing, you should

Put drupal as your database name
Put username system if your Apache is running as a service, otherwise, put the usename that you've set your apache to be running as.
There you go :)

Eva Wong - UCOSP: status report #9

2009-11-06T09:33:25+00:00

While I'm following getting Drupal on Ingres, I come across another set of tutorials that I found them useful in understanding the bigger picture.

Adding Apache user

Also, today I have come across some command from IRC that I found them useful to configure a php module on Windows.

Make sure...

you have your_whatever_module.dll is located in the path stated in the following line inside the php.ini file: extension_dir=whatever_extension_path
the variable inside php.ini is enabled to see any error messages
you don't have your path slashes backwards, path such as "C:\php\ext" works but "C:/php/ext" won't for Windows user like me.
If you run this command: \whatever_path_you_install_the_php\php.exe -i(and it should give you "C:\WINDOWS" by default), then you need to place the php.ini into that directory given by the command.
You see the php module that you want to install by running this command: \whatever_path_you_install_the_php\php.exe -m

Good luck installing :)!

I have got the php_ingres.dll module loaded in php, and next configure Apache with Ingres, then Drupal installation.

Eva Wong - Code: Test if Apache is working with Ingres

2009-11-06T09:28:47+00:00

The following is a piece of code that will help to see if Apache is talking to Ingres

error_reporting(E_ALL);

$link = ingres_connect("your_whatever_database_name")
or die("Could not connect");

echo "Connected successfully
";

?>

Ingres by default creates database with the access type public. If you explicitly put in a user name or password as parameters to ingres_connect for public database, it will fails to connect.

Now that I know Apache is talking to Ingres, next Drupal!

Eva Wong - Fix: Drupal on Ingres, install.php warnings

2009-11-06T09:24:17+00:00

While running the install script of Drupal on Windows XP, I came across the following warnings.

warning: ingres_query() [function.ingres-query]: Error: 7 - Unable to close non-result resource statement in /some_path_of_mine_where_drupal_sits/

Here is a list of actions that you can try out to make the list of warnings go away:

You might want to make sure that you have entered the correct user name (user name that apache runs as). Follow this to check if your Apache is running as a service or locally. If it is running as a service, put system as the user name, otherwise, put the windows account user name.
You might want to destroydb/createdb again because error messages during install could mess with it.
You might find it takes forever to delete the database, try restarting apache and goes again.

If all these don't work, try consulting the IRC channel #ingres :)

Fred Gallagher - Podcast: Ingres VectorWise – A Business Perspective

2009-11-04T21:47:35+00:00

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 · [...]

Eva Wong - Fix: Drupal on Ingres,Your web server does not appear to support any common database types.

2009-11-04T08:49:02+00:00

As of date 2009-Nov-04, Ingres support has not been integrated into the main Drupal product yet.

So when you run install.php under Drupal, if you "Your web server does not appear to support any common database types." Checkout the code from Ingres: http://code.ingres.com/apps/drupal/trunk instead of getting from Drupal.org

Planet Ingres

Andrew Ross - Step by step: configuring asterisk to enable call recording

Grant Croker - Ingres Administration Tools Webcast

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Eva Wong - UCOSP code sprint day #2

Teresa King - How to Locate Information About the Ingres JDBC Driver?

Chinese Puzzle - Button clicks do nothing in Ingres Database Workbench, Eclipse and its derivatives

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Eva Wong - UCOSP code sprint day #1

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Andrew Ross - Site updated

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Ingres Tech Blog - Views from Open Source for America

Ingres Tech Blog - Tidbits for your Stockings

Nikos Vaggalis - What I gained from Open Source

Nikos Vaggalis - Unrar Extract and Recover 1.4 released

Emma McGrattan - It’s Going to be a Blue Christmas!

Nikos Vaggalis - Unrar Extract and Recover 1.3 beta

Nikos Vaggalis - Archive::Unrar 1.1 released

Fred Gallagher - President’s Job Speech is Right On

Eva Wong - Screencast showing building GEOS and Geospatial as a non-root user in action on Linux

Eva Wong - UCOSP: 2009 fall term final thoughts

Andrew Ross - Call for conference hosting proposals - open source summercamp 2010

Fred Gallagher - New Economics and The Jobs Summit

Grant Croker - Maven driver repository updated

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Grant Croker - New Ingres Ruby driver and Rails adapter posted

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Fred Gallagher - Podcast: Ingres VectorWise – The Community

Chinese Puzzle - Every journey begins with a single step

Some random stuff

Grant Croker - Best Facebook Updates ever.

Some random posts

Andrew Ross - Microsoft deserves to make money with open source

Eva Wong - UCOSP: status report #14

Andrew Ross - Help us name our open source project

Fred Gallagher - Podcast: Ingres VectorWise – A Technical Discussion

Andrew Ross - Screen capture of capture software

Andrew Ross - Site has been moved to a new server

Andrew Ross - New open source project for capturing video

Eva Wong - UCOSP: status report #13

Eva Wong - A couple of notes when compiling Geospatial with GEOS, GDAL, MapServer

Eva Wong - UCOSP: status report #12

Andrew Ross - Technology management/leadership - we're doing it wrong

Roger Whitcomb - Ingres DBMS Tools

Ingres Tech Blog - Open Source continues to grow in Washington

Eva Wong - Running install.php of Drupal on Ingres

Eva Wong - UCOSP: status report #9

Eva Wong - Code: Test if Apache is working with Ingres

Eva Wong - Fix: Drupal on Ingres, install.php warnings

Fred Gallagher - Podcast: Ingres VectorWise – A Business Perspective

Eva Wong - Fix: Drupal on Ingres,Your web server does not appear to support any common database types.