Planet Ingres

The Evolved CIO

2008-05-06T17:55:33+00:00

Career Is Over?

When talking about our 100% SaaS / Open Source strategy at Ingres, I am often asked, “what will that mean for your future as a CIO” or “how do you maintain control of technology at the company” using this model. The first thing I let them know is that CIO means “Career Is Over” – then I try to smile.

Enablement & Alignment vs. Control

First things first. Control is overrated. The role of the “evolved” CIO is to focus on strategy, innovation, and enablement rather than worrying only about operational efficiency. Sure we have policies, governance, and security measures, and we need to assure the company’s information assets are protected. But we count on people to follow the policies, and we put technology in place to assure no harm is done.

Then I hear – what about all these SaaS offerings – people can just sign up and you have no idea what they are doing. I think several CIO’s have stories about the tool, utility, or even application that suddenly appeared on the network. I certainly have my own.

The First Time…

My first experience with SaaS was at my last company. We were mired in a very poor implementation of “Project Accounting” from a legacy software vendor. When new management for the Services group came in, we discussed the situation and the difficulty we were having upgrading this on-premise nightmare. The new local VP went out on his own and found several SaaS based PSA tools, and came to the conclusion that we should seriously consider 2 finalists, and rip out the legacy provider for this function.

At first I had the typical reaction to these events – shock and horror! How could we abandon the platform in preference for some point solution? What about integration? What about reporting? After this wore off, I realized this had to be a business driven solution, and I was either going to be a part of it, or be a detractor. Well, we ended up going through a bake-off and selected OpenAir, which quickly became a huge win for the services organization and for IT as well.

Darwin’s Theory

Instead of worrying about where this would fit in the data center, what servers it would run on, and how I was going to train our operations staff on its use, I had a chance to concern myself only with how to make this work for the business as effectively as possible. We transformed Lilly from our operations department into one of the best business analysts I have ever known. IT got out of the position of being a roadblock to the services group, and into the position of being a key partner.

Does this all mean there is no room for the CIO? Not at all – these are still complex decisions that require architectural consideration and due diligence. Vendor management becomes a bigger part of your life. Making sure there is air and power in the dc becomes less a part of your life. It’s all about focus.

I have a very similar story about the adoption of open source software – the need to evolve and adopt these solutions is very much the same as with SaaS, and will cover that one in a future posting.

Software Appliances, we need a definition please!

2008-05-05T18:50:57+00:00

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.

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Ingres Engineering Summit - From the user side ….

2008-05-01T00:14:08+00:00

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

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

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Ingres Engineering Summit 2008

2008-04-28T08:32:37+00:00

WOW! What a week.

I was lucky enough to participate in the Ingres Engineering Summit 2008 and I don’t think that a short blog could really do it justice. Ingres Engineering is distributed around the globe and this was an ideal opportunity to meet up and catch up. The summit was held in the Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, a really beautiful spot with great beaches, so they tell me and this year’s summit included a number of partners and academics who presented on a wide variety of topics. Jamie and Lisa who organized us all did an outstanding job, above and beyond the call of duty.

The engineering focus was on community and how to better engage it, interspersed with some very interesting presentations from our guests. Hugh Darwen presented on Project D, some academic work being undertaken by a doctorate student at the University of Warwick. CWI presented some interesting data for MonetDB/X100. Andy Grimm from rPath gave an interesting overview of their appliance technology and was able to help Paul Spencer from DM Solutions create one for MapServer.

A group of us joined forces to try and build a python driver for Ingres that uses the Data Access Message Protocol (DAMP) to communicate with the Data Access Server (DAS) and eliminate the need for the Ingres Net component. As part of this project we’ll also try out Mercurial for source control in a distributed environment. Unfortunately we didn’t get to show anything working but we’ll persevere with it.

The community related discussions can only be described as lively but they were thought provoking. Having worked with a few open source partners I know what I like; it’s just a matter of convincing the others

There was also a discussion of increasing the size of identifiers from the current 32 characters to 512. The change is simple but the impact will be quite widespread. After many suggestions of phased implementations and support for long and short names it was decided that we’d make a branch of the community code and make the change there; that would at least give everyone a working version that they could try and report back on. The SVN branch is ingres-main-long-identifiers from the ticket #23.

No doubt there will be pictures of us at work, rest and play; the links are starting to cascade into my in-box. If you see any that look like me, it is probably someone with an uncanny resemblance to yours truly.

I’m looking forward to the next one already.

SaaS and Open Source Join Forces

2008-04-25T22:08:11+00:00

Open Source adoption

Was just looking over a Gartner report, which finds that by 2010, 90% of SaaS providers will utilize “some” open source software in their offerings. But it is said that this use of open source is primarily limited to the vendor’s infrastructure and is not expected to offer them a “competitive advantage”.

Disruptive Technology Changes Everything

My first reaction was…huh? I believe these vendors absolutely will experience competitive advantages from their use of OSS infrastructure. The variable cost subscription model should allow SaaS players to grow or constrict their consumption of OSS at the same rate as their own customer subscriptions. In addition, access to talent – Engineers who excel at their craft and aggressively adopt OSS tools – provides an advantage to the player who adopts this strategy. In fact, SaaS vendors may go far beyond their initial deployments of OSS for infrastructure, and drive even greater success by increased adoption of OSS along with effective use of customer/developer communities as part of their offerings.

A Note of Truth?

I say this, as the tentative nature of the report reminded me of recent headlines in music industry journals. Record labels and retailers are reeling from their failure to adapt to disruptive changes in their own distribution model:

Apple’s iTunes online store just passed up Best Buy to become second largest music retailer in the country. They are about to launch a subscription based offering.
Wal-Mart, the number one music retailer in the country, are reportedly demanding that the major record labels reduce wholesale prices so that the average title can sell for less than $10.
This month Nine Inch Nails released a new album without a major record label, in packages ranging from a free download of nine tracks to a paid deluxe package for fans. The label that broke NIN filed for bankruptcy in February.
Only fifty-two percent of teenagers bought a CD in 2007, down from sixty-two percent in 2006.

Quite a fact pattern! SaaS and open source software movements, which are very much compatible, have the ability to inflict this kind of disruptive effect on the perpetually licensed proprietary software market.

Software 2008

2008-04-24T21:38:47+00:00

Who is going to the Software 2008 show next week April 29th and 30th in Las Vegas?

I am speaking there Tuesday April 29th at 3:45 p.m. under the following subject heading:

How Digital Killed the Analog Store: Open Source and SaaS Solutions Virtualize Global IT Delivery (also titled “how I stopped building data centers and learned to virtualize IT”). Yes I am fond of the movie “Dr. Strangelove” and that song by “The Buggles”. The presentation will focus on the twin disruptive forces of Open Source and SaaS solutions on the technology marketplace.

Our CEO and President, Roger Burkhardt, is on the keynote Software Trends panel Tuesday at 2:30 p.m., speaking about the future of technology.

Ingres will be there with a booth that emphasizes our latest solutions and services. Oh, get a “back stage pass” to join Ingres in our booth where we will be playing Rock Band and demoing Ingres on a PS3!

Come and see us at Software 2008 and make noise with Ingres!

Inside the Community - Ingres style….

2008-04-22T20:13:56+00:00

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

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OpenVMS Cluster Beta Now Available!

2008-04-16T21:17:23+00:00

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:

http://www.ingres.com/downloads/community-editions.php If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at: christine.normile@ingres.com

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A Little Bit Closed

2008-04-16T17:42:58+00:00

The MySQL conference is currently underway in Santa Clara and I’ve been watching the newswire and blogs for announcements and feedback. Yesterday I read in Jeremy Cole’s blog that Sun is holding back some vital features from the MySQL open source community, and providing those features only to their enterprise customers. Marten Mikos confirmed this and attempted to justify it in a comment posted on the blog. Regular readers of my blog will remember that in December I commented on the serious mistakes being made by Sun in open source, and this is another one that I’d add to that list. To be a little bit closed source is like being a “a little bit pregnant”. Either you’re open source and everything is done in the open, or you’re not. Holding back features such as on-line backup for enterprise customers only is unacceptable and it’s good to see the MySQL community calling Sun on this one. Ingres community and enterprise editions are built from the same source tree, we don’t hold back any functionality from the community edition. In addition, code that we receive from our community is delivered back to the Ingres user community in both editions.

On a related note, I heard a startling statistic from the PostgreSQL community yesterday, that less than 20% of the changes that are submitted by the community are accepted into the project. With Ingres we make every effort to accept all changes. We are involved with the community every step of the way, before, during, and after implementation and we’re always looking for new community developers, so if you’ve tried and been unsuccesful in engaging with PostgreSQL, then please come join the Ingres project. We will welcome you with open arms.

Establishing trust with your open source community

2008-04-16T17:20:57+00:00

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

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Open up the OpenROAD….

2008-04-16T16:53:34+00:00

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

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Why I Joined Ingres

2008-04-14T15:11:47+00:00

Came to Ingres and Opened Up Shop

One of the reasons I was excited to join Ingres is the fact that the management team was dedicated to the idea of supplying all of our business applications via Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions and everything else using open source software (OSS) solutions, including our own Ingres database. I had just gone through 2 years of painful but not uncommon downsizing effort at another company, taking IT spend from $8M down to $4M annually. I became convinced that the right way to provision IT is to maximize variable cost and get far away from large up-front capital expenditures. So I joined Ingres and we adopted a solutions sourcing strategy which included the 100% SaaS/OSS goal.

Lots of Solutions on the Menu

We started down this path with salesforce.com already in place for the sales team. We then selected Intacct Financials, and ADP’s HRIS system, all SaaS players themselves. Along the way we implemented SaaS based software from eProsper, Xactly, and others. We get our eMail from a hosting provider named MindSHIFT and our conferencing from WebEx. The only services we have in a data center include a wiki for our intranet (which we plan to replace with another open source provider), and our own Ingres IceBreaker BI Appliance using Jaspersoft. Our customer facing web properties are built with php, MediaWiki, and other open source tools and solutions all running on Ingres atop RedHat Linux, and hosted by Broadspire in Los Angeles and London.

Pay by the Pound

We pay for all this on run rate subscription model, including the open source software solutions (now that they are “in production”). We almost completely avoided the typical up-front data center, server, storage, and software costs of these solutions.

Not Looking Back

If this approach yields results that meet or exceed your business requirements why would you ever buy perpetual software licenses, or build and maintain a data center ever again? Watch this space for more news and stories about this strategy, and our experience thus far.

On the music front, I went to see Eddie Vedder (lead singer from Pearl Jam) last week with Liam Finn. Eddie wrote much of the soundtrack from the film “Into the Wild” last year and did most of those tracks at the show. Sometimes a musician has to “go acoustic” for you to really see through to their soul. This was one of those cases. Don’t miss this concert if it comes your way!

Ingres puts on a Red Hat..

2008-04-14T14:25:10+00:00

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

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Install Ingres via openSUSE’s zypper

2008-04-11T10:55:03+00:00

Ever wanted to install Ingres direct from the package manager of favourite Linux distro? Well now you can, via the command line or the GUI. Bellow are the steps for getting Ingres installed into openSUSE using zypper:

Czech Us Out

2008-04-09T09:50:16+00:00

We’re presently hosting the first ever Ingres Global Partner Summit in Prague and we have over 60 partners in attendance. Some of the partners who are in attendance have been Ingres partners for as long as I can remember and some, like SpagoBI, are recent additions to our partner portfolio and its been exciting to listen to our partners, new and old, share their successes.

I’ve always wanted to visit Prague so I decided to take advantage of the fact that I was coming to Europe for the partner summit to spend some time sightseeing. On Sunday I set out on a 4 hour tour of the city and was amazed at the parallels that could be drawn between this beautiful city and Ingres.

Prague enjoyed a golden age in the past and stands on the threshold of a new era. Prague has a lot of beautifully architected buildings whose classic design has withstood the test of time. Other buildings were erected, and then demolished and, redesigned, and rebuilt as advances were made in architecture – in much the way we’ve done with parts of the Ingres code over the years. Still others, such as the Dancing House Frank Gehry, have a thoroughly modern cutting edge design like many of the recent additions to Ingres. The blend of the classic with the post-modern reminds me a lot of Ingres.

To compare the time Ingres spent under the control of CA with the communist era would be crass and inaccurate, but certainly both Prague and Ingres have seen significant improvement and investment since they were liberated from their previous controllers and both have passed through the threshold to a new and brighter era.

More photos from the Ingres Partner Summit can be found at: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=32507&l=787eb&id=577801678

Entering the Blogosphere

2008-04-08T00:00:26+00:00

When someone walks into a meeting late, and there are people in the room who are just being introduced, I typically say to the latecomer, “Welcome - hey - as an icebreaker, everyone here already told a story from their childhood. Something involving fire would be good.” Once in awhile they oblige! Well, I suppose, being a late comer to the blogosphere I should go ahead and tell you one of mine.

I have been a dedicated fan of popular music from the time I was three years old. I still have a copy of the Beatles record, “Rubber Soul” that I played repeatedly, sneaking into my sister’s room to use the record player. At that early age I became a complete Anglophile. Ten years later, I was spinning anything out of Britain from the progressive rock acts of the time, including Jethro Tull, Yes, and so on. The “new wave” movement hit in the late 70’s and early 80’s and I was then again hooked on all types of creative bands such as Depeche Mode, Cocteau Twins, and others that mixed fashion, electronics and lots of attitude. My horizons expanded a bit from the 90’s on. For me, women saved the 90’s between Tori, Fiona, Natalie and other similar artists. The new millennium has my ever expanding collection taking up lots of disk space with music as rich and varied as any that has come before. Through each of these decades, I have played music, collected music, and attended live performances as frequently as possible. I would define myself as a music “aficionado”.

In many ways, my career in information technology fits in rather nicely with this passion for all things musical. When you read music, it is like its own language with a unique alphabet and organization. This is also true in the IT world with the programming languages and scripts that drive our solutions. Okay, sometimes the results are fairly mundane, but often, particularly in the last 10 years, there are amazing displays of creativity, all powered by new tools and technology. Each groundbreaking musical or technical achievement typically leads to a new longer period of assimilation, during which the new is made more broadly appealing, and is subsumed into the mainstream. Additional creativity is applied to create variations on the new themes, and spread the word. You can witness this happening in both the music and technology industries today.

We are in the midst of a groundbreaking era. Net based communities and social networks are being used to revolutionize software development, distribution and support providing these solutions are under open source licensing agreements. This disruptive market trend is represented by these new solutions, whether they are delivered via open source tools and platforms, or through subscription based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models. We are entering and to an extent, are already in a period of assimilation for these groundbreaking methods of IT delivery. These solutions fit the way we want to try to pay for technology - they may start as free or for trial usage, but when they are implemented, we will subscribe to the solution, on a basis more commensurate with our usage and the value generated by that usage. Traditional software vendors are finding it difficult or impossible to respond to this disruptive trend and move into these new markets effectively. It is truly an exciting time for the industry.

These developments parallel events in the music business. Providers such as iTunes, Amazon, and social networks such as MySpace threaten physical media for survival. Just last year, the band Radiohead offered its new music release for download without a major record label’s distribution - on their site - and for a price you set. Downloadable music, priced if you like by the song, is overtaking preconfigured record sales. My year-end mix in 2007 was built 95% from songs that I downloaded selectively. One of my favorite haunts of the last 20 years, Tower Records, just went out of business. Traditional record companies are struggling to survive technologies, which have disrupted decades-old music business processes. While old models change, new ones come in to take their place.

The entries in this blog will be covering developments in the IT marketplace from the perspective of the CIO. I will pay particular attention to open source and SaaS solutions. I hope to also find moments to share a bit of news or information from the world of music along the way.

I’ve Got Rhythm….

2008-04-02T18:00:48+00:00

Well actually I don’t! After years of feeling uncomfortable on a dance floor, I decided to go to the Arthur Murray Dance School for one-on-one dance tuition. Things didn’t go too well in my initial evaluation, and after an hour the instructor informed me that it was impossible to teach me to dance, I had no sense of rhythm and she was going to give me a complete refund of my money. It was the first time the instructor had ever had to admit defeat and I think we were equally disappointed. I can’t imagine an Ingres instructor ever telling a client that they could never be taught to be an Ingres DBA, but I could be wrong.

Following a recent conversation with our CIO, Doug Harr, who is a walking wikipedia of information relating to music, I decided to purchase the game “Rock Band” for my PS3. Rock Band includes peripherals to simulate electric guitar, bass and a drum kit as well as a microphone for the lead vocalist. The aim is to form a band and to score points by hitting scrolling notes on-screen. I’ve always wanted to play drums, but being devoid of rhythm and being completely uncoordinated I believed it was beyond me, but I’m really adept at computer games, so I figured that if I could treat it as a game rather than a musical challenge I could probably beat it (pun intended). I’m happy to report that I’m hitting notes now with 95%+ accuracy, which is on a par with my more coordinated and rhythmic friends.

I now have two games with almost identical USB peripherals to simulate guitars for the PS3 and I’m irritated by the fact that the peripherals are incompatible. There are third party peripherals available that will work with either “Rock Band” or “Guitar Hero”, but the manufacturers of these games have decided to cripple their peripherals to maximize their profits. It seems that taking advantage of one’s position as the sole provider of a piece of software to maximize revenue is not limited to the business software world.

Doug Harr is going to join me in the Ingres blogosphere next week. Doug’s blog will focus on our 100% OSS/SaaS strategy and like topics. He will mix in some tidbits about music and parallels in that marketplace. I’m sure it will be fun and informative, and I for one can’t wait to read him

Ingres Support for Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)

2008-04-02T17:57:34+00:00

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

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
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.

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.

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.
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.
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.

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Ingres and PHP VIP session rescheduled

2008-04-02T15:22:09+00:00

Due to unforeseen circumstances the Getting Started with Ingres and PHP session I was supposed to present next Wednesday, 9th April 2008, has been brought forward one day to April 8th. The session will provide the basics for getting up and running with PHP and Ingres, covering the different platforms supported by both Ingres and PHP.

To attend the session at 6am PDT (14:00 UK, 15:00 CEDT, 00:00 AEDT Weds) here
To attend the session at 5pm PDT (01:00 UK Weds, 02:00 CEDT Weds, 10:00 AEDT Weds) register here

The following week, 16th April, I will presenting a session on working on the driver code and how to submit changes in to the driver.

To attend the session at 6am PDT (14:00 UK, 15:00 CEDT, 00:00 AEDT Weds) here
To attend the session at 5pm PDT (01:00 UK Weds, 02:00 CEDT Weds, 10:00 AEDT Weds) register here

Hope to see you there.

Ingres Open Source Style

2008-03-31T14:49:12+00:00

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

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Getting Ingres up and running on Mac OS X Leopard

2008-03-28T18:09:19+00:00

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":

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.
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
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
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.

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Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2008

2008-03-28T08:45:22+00:00

This year Ingres is participating organization in GSoC, an event sponsored by Google that encourages students, of all levels, to get involved with Open Source. A summary of some proposed projects can be found here and here, any interested candidates need to get their skates on as the deadline for application is March 31, register and get more information at Guide to the GSoC Web App for Student Applicants. The

I have the privilege of being accepted as a mentor for Ingres. All of the project mentors have been introducing themselves on the mentors mailing list and there must be a few hundred of us. What strikes me, from the brief biographies, is the number of people who manage to dedicate their personal time for their projects. I have to take my hat off to them. Any Ingres community members who would like to mentor a project can register and get more information at Guide to the GSoC Web App for Mentors and Organization Administrators.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what develops

Ingres and the Google Summer of Code

2008-03-27T22:10:05+00:00

Ingres get’s more and more into the GPL swing of things with our participation this year in the Google Summer of Code. You can check out our project proposals here. Students should check out this URL for more information.

If you have a suggestion for another proposal that you would like to contribute to, please let us know soon and we will work to get it included if at all viable.

One of the new things (for us) we have up and running now for instant help and feedback is an IRC #ingres channel on freenode.net. If you’re interested in jumping on, but are not sure what IRC is and how to use it, check out wikipedia or for something a little more practically directed to getting you started, check out this FAQ.

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St Patrick’s Day Blues

2008-03-25T18:00:26+00:00

It was St Patrick’s Day last Monday, and I started the day feeling a little blue rather than green. I was to have spent the weekend in Dublin with my family, but instead found myself at an Eclipse Foundation board meeting in Santa Clara. I’ve recently been elected to the board of the Eclipse Foundation to represent the add-in provider community which includes Ingres and our friends at Laszlo and Red Hat. It was an insightful meeting and getting the opportunity to meet 1200 Eclipse Developers meant that EclipseCon was definitely worth sacrificing my planned St Patrick’s Day in Dublin.

On Tuesday, we announced the availability of Ingres CAFÉ, a community developed bundle that makes it easy for Eclipse developers to get started with Ingres and Eclipse. The bundle was developed by Samrat Dhillon of Carleton University, and we brought Samrat along to EclipseCon so that he could demonstrate it in person. What Samrat has done is to package Ingres, Eclipse (including the Ingres DTP plug-in), Hibernate, Tomcat, and JSF together with a simple installation process that lays down the entire package, with the components hard-wired to work together, with just three clicks. The bundle includes best of breed open source technologies packaged for flexibility. If, for instance, we decide to extend the scope to include Eclipse BIRT or the Spring Framework, it wouldn’t be difficult to do so.

The presentation that I delivered at EclipseCon was a humorous look at using a Sony PS3 for Eclipse development. It was meant as a light-hearted session to end a long day, but to my great surprise I had about a half a dozen attendees stay behind at the end of the presentation to ask questions about floating point arithmetic and building eight node PS3 clusters. Developers! You’ve got to love them!

Alfresco and Ingres: Enterprise-Class Open Source for Content Management

2008-03-24T13:48:22+00:00

Ingres has joined forces with Alfresco to provide true open source alternative to Enterprise Content Management. Alfresco is the leading open source provider for document, records, knowledge, and web content management. In addition to traditional content management services, Alfresco enables collaboration support for the internet way of business.

The benefits of Alfresco and Ingres as a combined solution:

Availability – out of the box online backup and recovery
Security – a centralized repository requires proper data protection
Scalability – users can start small and grow to enterprise wide deployments
Mission critical experience - applied to content management solutions
Open source – total enterprise grade open source solution

Ingres and Alfresco Bundle

Ingres and Alfresco want developers and end users to get up and running quickly and easily. That’s why we built an integrated bundle of Alfresco with Ingres so users can install both technologies in one easy install.

Download now!

For More Information:

Visit our Alfresco & Ingres community project page

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Cached Dynamic Query

2008-03-22T08:54:01+00:00

It has been a very busy few months and the appliance team moves apace and is continuously subjected to requests for new applications and Ingres releases.

With the latest release of Ingres one of the new features is cached dynamic query plans; that will benefit any application that uses prepared dynamic queries.

Ingres has long had the ability to cache query plans for stored procedures and from queries in embedded SQL programs using the REPEATED keyword. The latter has meant that queries are identified and tagged in the application. For applications that are written using a driver for example, ODBC, JDBC, .NET and PHP it hasn’t been possible, until now, to use store a query plan for reuse. This feature benefits queries that take a long time to optimize and compile (for a particular value of long) and obviously the more times the same query is executed the better the benefit of caching as the optimization and compilation time is amortized over the number of executions.

As this is the first implementation it is disabled by default and the scope is severely limited. For now it is implemented only for selects and for queries that require greedy enumeration.

To give an example; the application that I am using generates queries for its underlying database and I have no control over it. These queries although complex return a very low volume of results. Looking at the query plans there are between 50 and 80 candidate tables and indices. Without greedy enumeration these queries don’t even compile, not only that but these queries are executed hundreds of times. With greedy enumeration the query must complete compilation, before that there is only a partial plan so setting join op time out won’t help.

So here is how you can control caching:

CBF - ii.hostname.dbms.*.cache_dynamic: ON or OFF

SQL - server control: set [no]cache_dynamic - alter the current server setting including overriding the CBF parameter. - session control: set session [no]cache_dynamic - enable/disable query caching within a session - status: select dbmsinfo('cache_dynamic') - Y or N - status imadb: select rqp_text from ima_qsf_rqp shows query text for cached text objects for dynamic cursors.

Until cached dynamic query plans I had to suffer in silence. I’d be interested if anyone else finds the feature a benefit, if you do let me know.

Ingres CAFE - Writing web applications w/ Eclipse

2008-03-18T15:38:39+00:00

Over the past year we have had quite a bit of interest in the Eclipse dtp bundle and this has spurred interest in building an integrated developer’s stack. Ingres CAFE is such a project that was spearheaded by Samrat Dhillon, a graduate student at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Ingres CAFE bundles the Eclipse IDE, Ingres Database, Apache Tomcat, Hibernate Libraries, and JSF libraries into a single installable package complete with documentation and integrated maintenance. There is also a demo included to help developers get started with the tool.

Check out Ingres CAFE and let us know what you think and future developer tools you would like to see working with Ingres.

Great job to the students at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

deb woods

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Ingres accepted as a Google Summer of Code organization

2008-03-18T07:08:42+00:00

Ingres has been accepted as a mentoring organization for Google’s Summer of Code. The list of ideas put forward by Ingres can be found at http://www.ingres.com/events/summerofcode.php.

If Ingres was a car what car would it be?

2008-03-07T18:00:11+00:00

In the early days of Ingres Corp, the AR-PR team did an exercise with the executive team to understand how they viewed Ingres. One of the questions they asked was “If Ingres was a car what car would it be?” I’m not really a car person, so I answered “C Class Mercedes Benz”. Now the fact that I drive a C Class Benz with a license plate that reads “INGRES” probably had something to do with my answer, but I was able to back up my response. My car provides great value for the money, is very well equipped, incredibly reliable, and handles anything that’s thrown at it with ease. It is backed up by an amazing team, and has roots in Europe and in the US. There are obviously cars out there that can go from 0-60 faster and can achieve greater speeds, but when the state speed limit is 55 miles an hour, and most of my driving is on local roads, those things just don’t matter to me.

PostgreSQL I saw as a kit car. It is built with love, care, and attention, but difficult to get insurance for and no obvious place to take it when problems arise. Although, there are those that will fix it for a fee.

MySQL (now Sun) I saw as a silver Honda Civic. It is hugely popular, but most people who drive it do so because of the price. Now you can soup up a Civic by adding stripes, a spoiler and funky blue neon under carriage lights, but it’s still a Civic. There are some who take their Honda Civics seriously and have been known to switch out the factory engine and to even add nitrous oxide tanks to the car but by the time you’ve done all that you may as well have bought the car you really wanted.

So what do you think? What car do you envision Ingres as and why?

Woman on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown

2008-02-28T03:50:47+00:00

It’s no secret that I have a 400 a day email habit and need a fix for my Blackberry Addiction approximately every six seconds. In fact it has gotten so bad that my friends and family have performed interventions and confiscated the device, but even without it on my hip, I can feel it vibrate in much the same way an amputee feels an itch in a missing limb.

Yesterday I encountered a problem with my device when the Blackberry Messenger icon wouldn’t respond. It hasn’t happened before, but I’ve learned that pulling the battery usually fixes problems of this nature so I did that, and paced the halls for two minutes while the device power cycled. When it came back on-line the Blackberry Messenger icon had disappeared altogether. I searched bytes high and low but didn’t find it. I started with Google and then turned to the Blackberry Forums for assistance. I tried pretty much every suggestion I could find and finally resorted to chatting on-line with a technician. The first suggestion I received was to wipe my device of all data; I couldn’t quite understood how that would solve the problem, nor could the technician, but we tried it anyway — to no avail. Next up was wiping the device of all software and reinstalling it from the operating system layer up, but this too failed to reinstate the messenger icon. The instructions got increasingly ridiculous and far fetched, but I persevered until support closed at 11pm. Yes, that’s right; a service provider on which many of us are dependent for a critical business function closes their support center at 11pm Eastern.

After a sleepless night I was back on-line at 6am to chat with support, but to my complete shock I learned that support doesn’t power on their PCs, or pick up their phones until 8am. At 8am in NY, the Europeans are half way through their business day, but my business service provider is just getting started. I was hopeful though, that after a good night’s sleep a new technician would crack the problem in minutes, but that wasn’t to be. In fact, when I mentioned that my colleague had exactly the same problem on a different model Blackberry but on their network, they told me that they’d exhausted their list of suggestions and asked that I have our IT hero, Luigi, try to crack it instead. I was transported to the early 90s when support was offered during business hours and the remedy to all problems was to reboot the PC.

I’ve blogged about the Ingres Service Network (ISN) in the past, and I’ve spoken at events about the need to turn the customer support experience on its head. The only silver lining I can see in this is that I’ll have added a few more personal anecdotes to my repertoire, and that I’m more certain than ever that we’re doing the right thing in focusing on building a completely new customer support experience. But for now, I’m wearing a hat crafted from aluminum foil, standing on one leg, facing east, while chanting the Ingres Source Code backward in an attempt to resurrect the Blackberry Messenger icon. Of course, if RIM were to open their source code, I could probably have fixed the problem myself overnight.

Reassuringly Expensive?

2008-02-01T18:00:33+00:00

I grew up in Ireland, a land of saints and scholars, where we’re uniquely blessed with an expansive and colorful vocabulary. My father banned only one word from the family home, that word was “cheap”. We learned an understanding and appreciation for ”value” from an early age, and in fact we conducted “TCO” studies long before we understood that term. “Cheap”, we learned, was a waste of hard earned money, “inexpensive”, on the other hand, could often be a part of a good value proposition.

This year I’ve resolved to get fit and decided to buy a treadmill so that I could combine my love of junk TV with exercise.

It will come as no surprise to learn that I’ve no experience with treadmills, so I turned to the internet for research and guidance. I learned that there were four key factors that should influence decision making: the width and length of the platform, the size of the engine, and the price; pretty much all of the websites I visited advised against machines under the magical $1000 price tag. Outside of the stock market, this is the first time that I’ve encountered a buying recommendation based on price and I found it perplexing. Price may be an indicator of some underlying factors that I should be considering in my selection process, but what’s the difference between a $950 and a $1050 treadmill? From comparing various models I could see that for some brands it could represent the difference between a wireless rather than wired heart rate monitor, d! eeper cup holders, built in fan, but did these features matter to me? Some of the machines that came in under the $1000 mark had a $250 shipping fee while some of those over $1000 offered free shipping, some had a four year warranty, others a lifetime warranty. Making purchase price a selection criteria went against everything I stand for, so after deciding on what mattered to me in a treadmill, I did my own TCO study and made a decision based on my findings.

One of the challenges that we have in open source is in convincing those who believe that you get what you pay for, that they should ignore the price-tag, and make a decision based upon the criteria that matter to their business. There are those who have a preconceived idea as to what they should be spending on a database, and it’s difficult to have them take you seriously if you’re carrying a $0 price tag. I’ve long ago learned that people put a value on goods dependent upon what they pay for them, and we need to educate these people to consider value, and not purchase price. First one needs to consider business requirements like transaction rates, workload, availability, service levels, 24×7 support, platform support, availability of skilled resources, etc. etc. Then, if all of the boxes are ticked, a TCO study should be conducted and at this point it will become obvious that if an open source solution is under consideration it will exhibit a compelling value proposition.

There’s a beer in Europe called Stella Artois which advertises itself under the tagline “Reassuringly Expensive” and while it costs the same as other beers in its class, there are those who buy it because of that tag line. These are probably the same people who place extra importance on their Oracle deployments every year that their license fees are increased.

Think Global, Act Local

2008-01-30T18:00:08+00:00

Regular readers of my blog will recall that late last year I described France as a hot-bed of open source activity. Today you may have seen the announcement from the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), of which Ingres is a member, announcing the formation of OSA Europe. The European Chapter of the OSA shares the goal of building compelling open solutions, based upon the integration and interoperability of best of breed open source solutions, and promoting best practices and frameworks around these solutions.

OSA Europe will provide regional focus towards achieving this global goal. At this week’s Solutions Linux show in Paris, from which today’s announcement was made, a number of OSA members are demonstrating integration and interoperability, and if you’re at the show I’d like to invite you to come chat with the team at the Ingres booth to learn more about Ingres.

Fortunately for Ingres we have a very strong partner team in Europe, led by Ru Kumar, and in France the dynamic duo of Eric Soares and Serge Goldstein have their fingers on the pulse of local open source activity. Integration and interoperability has long been a promise of open source, and it’s encouraging to see these open source projects, along with open source service providers, working together to deliver on this promise. New open source partnerships and alliances are as important to our success as the enduring partnerships that Ingres has built over the years, and we are actively cultivating both.

MySQL partners who are unsure of their future commitment to MySQL are invited to contact Ingres to understand the unique value proposition that Ingres provides. Ingres prides itself on providing the open source model you want, and the proven enterprise strength you need.

ingstatus

2008-01-24T10:17:53+00:00

I’ve been clearing out some old files and found an example of ingstatus for Windows. Ingstatus is a utility that is available on Linux and UNIX. This example uses the functions available in the little known library iilibutil.dll. I’ve put it on the community site on the ingstatus page.

The iilibutil library contains some useful functions for incorporating some Ingres management features into programs. These functions need updating and documenting, but could form the foundation of a management API.

Something that could be considered for inclusion in the Ingres Janitor’s project.

Rapid

2008-01-21T10:38:29+00:00

It now seems a very long time ago, but last November I took part in a team meeting where we discussed how to evangelize Ingres within our own sphere of influence. Projects similar to the Playstation 3 port and the Eclipse DTP were mentioned as innovative. During the meeting I was asked to take a look at OpenLaszlo to try and modify one of their demonstration applications to use Ingres as a data source.

Being a tomcat, JSP and OpenLaszlo nubbie I managed to get the Amazon Store demo to use Ingres for the checkout and shipping address details. A couple of JSPs a two line change in OpenLaszlo source and the demo was reading data from Ingres. The code changes took 5 minutes, getting it to work took a little longer. I used OpenLaszlo 4.0.7 for my tests but OpenLaszlo 4.0.8 is now available.

Take a look at the OpenLaszlo source code at the line<dataset name="dsAddressList" src="data/addresses.xml"/> <dataset name="dsCreditCardList" src="data/creditcards.xml"/>

These were modified to<dataset name="dsAddressList" src="/ingdb/getaddress.jsp" request="true" type="http"/> <dataset name="dsCreditCardList" src="/ingdb/creditcard.jsp" request="true" type="http"/>Setting request=”true” causes the client to request data each time the query string or the base URL changes.

My initial pages and tomcat configuration is documented on the page “Accessing data from JSP” and contains the simple DDL for the table and some sample data. In this example the database and credentials are embedded in the page. With a little more time I changed the JSP to use the JSTL and configured the tomcat server with a JNDI resource for the database connection. My latest attempt is document on the page “JDBC and JNDI”.

For 2008 the watchword is “Rapid”. Rapid application development and deployment, everything has to happen faster. Using an environment like OpenLaszlo gets part of the way there.

We’ll be looking at subject matter for a development sprint at the forthcoming UK IUA in June. An OpenLaszlo application may be a candidate.

Ruby 1.2.2 released

2008-01-18T16:06:05+00:00

Yesterday, I/we released version 1.2.2 of the Ruby driver and RoR adaptor for Ingres. The release is a small update that includes the following changes:

Fix quote() in ingres_adapater.rb to use the class of variable rather than the equivalent Ingres column type.
Fix segvio in Ingres Ruby driver when fetching char/varchar with data longer than 4074 bytes.

The following files have been added to keep a track of the changes made and the work still to be done:

The latest readme.html and driver package (source code) can be downloaded from http://www.ingres.com/downloads/prod-download-drivers.php

Should you wish to provide feedback of any sort you can e-mail me (grant (at) planetingres (dot) org), post to the Ingres Ruby driver forum or to comp.databases.ingres.

A funny thing happened on the way to the office

2008-01-16T18:00:23+00:00

I hopped on a plane in New York this morning and planned on writing a blog about new year’s resolutions. Resolution one is to “Stop Procrastinating” which might explain why that particular blog is three weeks behind schedule. When I landed in SFO, my blackberry almost melted under the strain of all the email traffic around the MySQL and BEA acquisitions.The BEA/Oracle announcement wasn’t exactly news to me, and I suspect that the Project Fusion team at Oracle are delighted to have the complexity of their middle ware integration challenge raised by an order of magnitude or two. Is this an interesting or strategic acquisition for Oracle? I don’t think so; in fact I’m reminded of all the Borg cartoons that were circulated around the Ingres team when CA announced they were acquiring ASK back in 1994.

In contrast, the MySQL news came as a complete surprise, and a happy one at that. I’d often commented in the past year how Marten Mikos seems to have lost his joie-de-vivre, since his role shifted from having fun with the community, to dealing with the bankers and business folks to plan a much rumored IPO. One issue that must have been weighing on Marten’s mind over the past year is how to address the transactional engine conundrum, an issue that became even more important today given that two cornerstones of the MySQL solution are in “enemy hands” with Oracle’s ownership of InnoDB and IBM’s ownership of SolidDB. I just joked with Bob Zurek, of EnterpriseDB, that I wouldn’t be surprised to see Sun propose an arranged marriage between MySQL and PostgreSQL. Sun has some good PostgreSQL folks on board and it could be an interesting challenge for them. Ingres went from being a forgotten technology in a company deriving a lot of its business from a competing technology to being an independent open source database company focused on growth, and now it appears that MySQL has gone in the opposite direction.

So, what does this mean for Ingres? Well to start with it makes us the only independent open source database company, which will no doubt open up new partnership opportunities for Ingres. The price tag Sun is paying for MySQL has many “swivel-chair financial analysts” trying to put a valuation on Ingres today. Above all else, I believe that Sun’s acquisition of MySQL is a ringing endorsement of the open source model.

To hear what other open source thought leaders in the Open Solutions Alliance have to say about today’s news, take a look at the blogroll at http://blog.opensolutionsalliance.org/. I promised them a mention in this blog in return for being added to the blogroll.