Planet Ingres

UK IUA - UK IUA 2010 Call for Community Award Nominees

2010-03-10T08:43:43+00:00

At the 2009 UK IUA conference the UK IUA presented its Community
Service Award to Rick van der Lans, author of the SQL Guide to Ingres.

The Community Service Award is given to someone who has made a
noteworthy contribution to the Ingres Community. The Ingres Community
consists of all users of Ingres, OpenROAD, and any of the related
products and projects.

Nominations are now being accepted for this year's award. Please send
your nomination with a brief explanation of why you think your nominee
deserves the award, to award2010@iua.org.uk.

The winner will be chosen by jury from the nominees received by
Friday, May 21, 2010.

Roy

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UK IUA - UK IUA 2010 Call for Papers Now Open!

2010-03-10T08:40:17+00:00

UK Ingres User Association Conference 2010
8th June 2010, London www.iua.org.uk

Outlines or abstracts for presentations on Ingres, OpenROAD, open source,
or any other Ingres-related topics are welcome. The theme for this year's
event is "Open Source Innovation" so any papers relating to Ingres and Open
Source tools and products would be particularly welcome.

The UK IUA Committee invites anyone working with Ingres or OpenROAD, or
related technologies to submit ideas for papers to be presented at this
year's annual conference. The conference will take place on 8th June
2010 in Central London (venue to be confirmed). A sell-out crowd attended the high quality presentations at last
year's event, and with your assistance and contribution, we aim to make
this year's IUA Conference an even bigger success.

Outlines and abstracts can be submitted in any reasonable format (e.g.
Word, plain text, Powerpoint, PDF, etc.). Please submit your ideas for
papers via email to Ray Collins (ray.collins@iua.org.uk) by Monday, 12 April 2010 for evaluation by the conference paper selection committee.
Note that you need only send an outline or proposal at this stage. You
do not need to provide a complete presentation to be considered.

Notification of whether your paper has been selected or rejected will be sent by Friday 30 April 2010. Topics we are particularly interested in hearing about this year:

* VectorWise
* Hardware and software consolidation, and virtualization
* Applications developed with Open Source
* Migrations to Open Source
* Ingres Community Projects
* Open Source economics
* Management issues in Open Source
* Productivity Tools
* Security
* Improving Performance

If you have any questions regarding this year's 2010 Conference, the
committee members are happy to assist. Please send all questions and
queries to info@iua.org.uk.

Thank you to all who have supported the IUA by presenting at our previous
Meetings, Special Events and the Annual Conference in the past, and for
your continued interest and support of the UK IUA.

Roy

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UK IUA - The UK IUA Posterous

2010-03-10T08:28:20+00:00

At the IUA we're always keen to promote the Ingres family of products
and projects any way we can. Posterous is our latest experiment. We
plan to use this blog to keep our community informed about planning
for the 2010 UK IUA conference, the world's favorite Ingres event.

Roy

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Andrew Ross - No Ottawa business breakfast tomorrow

2010-03-09T17:35:55+00:00

Since July last year we've been holding an open source business breakfast meeting once a month. The events have been very interesting, educational, and fun. Despite that, we've decided to put the breakfasts on hold for a bit to allow us to focus on other activities. We'll share more about what we're working on soon.

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Dean Vernon - Nieve, Snow in Barcelona ... and stuck in the office

2010-03-09T09:53:00+00:00

Andrew Ross - Most popular computer languages used by big brains

2010-03-05T13:23:07+00:00

I was recently listening to a FLOSS Weekly podcast (episode 100, congratulations!) interviewing Chris DiDona from Google. One of the items he spoke of that resonated with me was his/their practice of deciding who they wanted to reach and focusing on that audience even if it meant delaying or forgoing contact with others. DiBona explained that to him, it seemed Google was the place Computer Scientists go to practice Computer Science. Thus, though it would be nice to reach other people such as open source enthusiasts, their real desire was to reach computer scientist practitioners. The rate of innovative product development, focus on algorithms and performance, and more demonstrate that nurturing Computer Scientists is a key part of Google's success. Thus I found it very interesting to see the languages chosen by entrants in Google's AI challenge organized by the University of Waterloo. Read on the see the list.

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Teresa King - Ever have trouble identifying when a feature was introduced in Ingres?

2010-03-02T22:03:12+00:00

It's always challenging to discover what features were released in a particular Ingres version when trying to plan a migration from one release of Ingres to another.

This document attempts to complement the Ingres Migration Guide by not only providing the list of features but also including the associated project page if one exists on the Community Wiki. In some cases, the release will predate the move by Ingres Engineering to make the design documents of new features readily accessible to the community. The Ingres Migration Guide should always be the first point of reference when research is underway concerning a migration from one Ingres release to another but hopefully the information provided here will also be beneficial.

Per Keith's great comment, the Ingres Product Roadmap is availabe at Product Roadmaps. As Ingres 10 moves closer to a GA status, a similar page/layout will be provided and added to here.

Teresa King - How to Locate Information About the Ingres .NET Data Provider?

2010-03-02T21:48:22+00:00

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

Most of this information is centrally located at Ingres .NET Development Center. We try to ensure all content on the wiki related to .NET 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 .NET Framework supported, the assembly name, assembly version needed for a particular .NET Data Provider version.

Accessible from this page are:

• Articles relating to using .NET with Ingres and integration of Ingres with .NET Applications. To directly check out all articles see Ingres .NET Articles.
• Coding samples relating to using new Ingres features from .NET. To directly check out all coding samples see Ingres .NET Coding Samples.
• Presentations around .NET and Ingres. To directly check out all presentations see Ingres .NET related presentations.

More recently the section was updated to clearly document what features where introduced in what .NET Data Provider 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 .NET Data Provider.

Questions can always be posted to the Data Provider Forum.

Feedback is always welcome.

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

2010-03-02T21:36:52+00:00

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

Most of this information is centrally located at Ingres ODBC Development Center. We try to ensure all content on the wiki related to ODBC 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.

Accessible from this page are:

• Articles relating to using ODBC applications with Ingres and integration of Ingres with ADO, MS Access, etc. To directly check out all articles see Ingres ODBC Articles.
• Coding samples relating to using new Ingres features from ODBC. To directly check out all coding samples see Ingres ODBC Coding Samples.

More recently the section was updated to clearly document what features where introduced in what ODBC Driver 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 ODBC driver.

Questions can always be posted to the Driver Forum.

Feedback is always welcome.

Dean Vernon - Apple iPad and the Ingres RDBMS

2010-03-02T16:38:00+00:00

Dean Vernon - Weather Report ... Clouds

2010-03-01T17:04:00+00:00

Grant Croker - List of Ingres functions per release

2010-02-25T15:57:00+00:00

Yesterday Ray Fan published an article that shows IMA queries that allow you to see the list of functions available for different Ingres releases. I’ve now taken these queries an generated a list of functions for Ingres 9.2.0 with the added functions for 9.3.0 and 10.0.0 (a recentish build). I’ve not looked at earlier releases as the SQL did not work with my 9.1.0 installation. When I get the time I’ll update the page going back to 9.0.4, or you could do the same .

Dean Vernon - Valladolid - Good wine and PHP

2010-02-25T14:22:00+00:00

Dean Vernon - The Global Workplace - Managing Virtual Teams

2010-02-25T10:43:00+00:00

Andrew Ross - What's going on with open source job opportunities?

2010-02-24T16:55:16+00:00

About this time last year, I made time to sit down and blog about trends I was seeing in the job market pertaining to open source skills. This is an update after 1 year. What are the trends in the job industry pertaining to open source? Evidence indicates there are good jobs out there if you know where to look.

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Grant Croker - What BLOB tables do I have?

2010-02-23T14:12:43+00:00

The following is SQL code was published in the #ingres IRC channel on freenode in response to a question about the best method to determine which iietab_xx_yy table belongs to which table:

select r1.relid as base_table,
       c.attname as column_name,
       r2.relid as extend_table
from iirelation r1,iirelation r2,iiattribute c,iiextended_relation e
where r1.reltid=e.etab_base and r2.reltid=e.etab_extension
  and r1.reltid=c.attrelid
  and c.attid=e.etab_attid
  and r1.reltidx=0
  and c.attrelidx=0
order by base_table,column_name

Running this against my demodb database I get the following:

┌────────────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────┐
│base_table                      │column_name                     │extend_table                    │
├────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────┤
│nclob                           │ntext                           │iietab_367_368                  │
│nclob2                          │ntext                           │iietab_369_36a                  │
│nclob2                          │ntext2                          │iietab_369_36b                  │
│nclob3                          │ntext                           │iietab_3c0_3c1                  │
│user_profile                    │up_image                        │iietab_f5_f6                    │
└────────────────────────────────┴────────────────────────────────┴────────────────────────────────┘
(5 rows)

Extending the above query we can also determine the size of each iietab_xx_yy table:

select r1.relid as base_table,
       c.attname as column_name,
       r2.relid as extend_table,
	   t.allocated_pages * float4(t.table_pagesize) / 1024 / 1024
       as megabytes
from iirelation r1, iirelation r2,
     iiattribute c, iiextended_relation e,
     iitables t
where r1.reltid=e.etab_base
  and r2.reltid=e.etab_extension
  and r1.reltid=c.attrelid
  and c.attid=e.etab_attid
  and r1.reltidx=0
  and c.attrelidx=0
  and t.table_reltid = e.etab_extension
  order by megabytes desc;

For example:

┌────────────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────┬───────────┐
│base_table                      │column_name                     │extend_table                    │megabytes  │
├────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────┼───────────┤
│nclob2                          │ntext2                          │iietab_369_36b                  │      1.258│
│nclob2                          │ntext                           │iietab_369_36a                  │      0.258│
│nclob                           │ntext                           │iietab_367_368                  │      0.258│
│nclob3                          │ntext                           │iietab_3c0_3c1                  │      0.258│
│user_profile                    │up_image                        │iietab_f5_f6                    │      0.258│
└────────────────────────────────┴────────────────────────────────┴────────────────────────────────┴───────────┘

Useful if you want to know how much space your BLOB/CLOB data is taking up. Thanks to Kristoff, Paul and Gerhard for working out the SQL.

Updated to recognize Kristoff Picards’ contribution

Dean Vernon - We're not all like this

2010-02-23T12:31:00+00:00

Is there a stereotype of a nerd or geek? All I know is that the Ingres guys certainly fall into that image.

Still they say geeks are the new celebrities, and that the football jocks don’t stand a chance due to the attraction powers of the geek brain.

No evidence of that here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUMf_iQQpcA , but I’m gonna get a white lab coat just in case ;-)

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Dean Vernon - Posterous Apple Lovers

2010-02-23T12:21:00+00:00

Dean Vernon - About Ingres

2010-02-23T11:55:00+00:00

I could direct you to http://www.ingres.com/about/ ... but to be honest wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingres_%28database%29

probably does a better job of explaining the roller coaster of a working life I have with Ingres ;-)

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Chinese Puzzle - Useful or useless? Follow on post …

2010-02-23T08:48:36+00:00

Way back in May last year I experimented with some IMA tables that showed data types and operators defined in the DBMS. Further poking around and a table for a list of the function instances is available,

drop ima_dbms_fis;
\p\g
register table ima_dbms_fis (
        server varchar(64) not null not default is
                'SERVER',
        id integer4 not null not default is
                'exp.adf.adg.fi_id',
        complement integer4 not null not default is
                'exp.adf.adg.fi_cmplmnt',
        type varchar(20) not null not default is
                'exp.adf.adg.fi_type',
        flags integer4 not null not default is
                'exp.adf.adg.fi_flags',
        opid integer4 not null not default is
                'exp.adf.adg.fi_opid',
        args integer4 not null not default is
                'exp.adf.adg.fi_numargs',
        dtresult integer4 not null not default is
                'exp.adf.adg.fi_dtresult',
        dtarg1 integer4 not null not default is
                'exp.adf.adg.fi_dtarg1',
        dtarg2 integer4 not null not default is
                'exp.adf.adg.fi_dtarg2',
        dtarg3 integer4 not null not default is
                'exp.adf.adg.fi_dtarg3',
        dtarg4 integer4 not null not default is
                'exp.adf.adg.fi_dtarg4'
)
as import from 'tables'
with dbms = IMA,
structure = sortkeyed,
key = (server);
\p\g
grant all on ima_dbms_fis to ingres;
\p\g
grant select on ima_dbms_fis to public;
\p\g

Adding this table to ima_dbms_types and ima_dbms_operators adds the ability to retrieve the list of functions and their signatures. The query makes use of an internal function iitypename which translates the numeric type code into a name.

select
    a.name,
    case when a.type='COMPARISON' then
        trim(iitypename(b.dtresult)) + ' = ( ' +
        trim(iitypename(b.dtarg1)) + ' ' +
        a.name + ' ' +
        trim(iitypename(b.dtarg2)) + ' )'
        when a.type='OPERATOR' then
        trim(iitypename(b.dtresult)) + ' = ( ' +
        trim(iitypename(b.dtarg1)) + ' ' +
        a.name + ' ' +
        trim(iitypename(b.dtarg2)) + ' )'
    else
        trim(iitypename(b.dtresult)) + ' = ' +
        a.name + '( ' +
            case when b.dtarg1 != '' then trim(iitypename(b.dtarg1)) else '' end +
            case when b.dtarg2 != '' then ', ' + trim(iitypename(b.dtarg2)) else '' end +
            case when b.dtarg3 != '' then ', ' + trim(iitypename(b.dtarg3)) else '' end +
            case when b.dtarg4 != '' then ', ' + trim(iitypename(b.dtarg4)) else '' end
        + ' )'
    end as signature
from
    ima_dbms_operators a,
    ima_dbms_fis b
where
    a.opid = b.opid
group by a.name, 2
order by a.name

Some sample output from this query:

|name                          |signature                       |
|soundex                       |char = soundex( text )          |
|soundex                       |char = soundex( varchar )       |
|sqrt                          |float = sqrt( float )           |
|squeeze                       |nvarchar = squeeze( nchar )     |
|squeeze                       |nvarchar = squeeze( nvarchar )  |
|squeeze                       |text = squeeze( c )             |

So in answer to my own question; yes, it is useful. I’ll be trying this on an IngresGeospatial build when I get my hands on one.

Emma McGrattan - Barbie and Me

2010-02-22T22:44:43+00:00

The recent news that Mattel is about to release Software Engineering Barbie has me reflecting on my childhood and my route to a career in software engineering.

As a little girl I idolized my father who was a mechanical services engineer. I was a “tom boy” and my father always encouraged my interest in science, engineering and computers by spending a small fortune feeding my technology addiction. I aspired to be just like my dad and to me a career in engineering seemed like a fascinating and obvious choice. When it came to discussing my career ambitions with my dad I was devastated when he tried to discourage me from becoming an engineer by telling me bluntly that he’d never hire a female engineer and couldn’t think of one of his friends who would.

Dad was probably as devastated as I was to have to have that conversation, but it was Ireland in the early 80s and there were girl’s schools in Ireland back then that didn’t even teach math to the level required to qualify to study engineering at the University level.

Some teenagers rebel against their parents by getting tattoos, body piercings, having a child out of wedlock, or abusing drugs; I rebelled by acquiring a degree in electronic engineering.

My sister Tara was my polar opposite. From an early age it seemed that Tara’s ambition in life was to get married and become the perfect wife and mother. Tara was as obsessed with dolls and dresses as I was with mechanics and computers. Tara would probably have been the perfect target market for Computer Engineering Barbie but I suspect that Tara’s Barbie would not have been slinging code, but instead would have been posting photos of her perfect family on Facebook and Skyping with her husband Ken who was the multi-millionaire founder of an internet start-up. Would Software Engineering Barbie have changed Tara’s career ambitions? Not a chance!

I’ve never owned a Barbie in my life. In fact growing up I loathed everything that Barbie and her gender stereo-typing stood for. Does the fact that Software Engineering Barbie will soon join the Barbie stable of playmates mean that Software Engineering is now considered an acceptable profession for Barbie loving girly-girls?

I’m visiting Scotland in a couple of weeks to speak at a Girl Geek event and will be visiting universities in Edinburgh and Glasgow while I’m there. I plan to ask the latest crop of female engineering students what their take on this whole Barbie thing is, and post a follow-on blog then.

If you want Deb’s take on Software Engineering Barbie, you can check out her blog on the topic here. John Smedley pointed me to the following link which includes ideas on how to make Computer Engineer Barbie more realistic.

Epilogue: My father passed away during the time that we were forming Ingres Corporation but he couldn’t have been prouder of my accomplishments. Tara went on to marry Stephen, a software engineer, and is now the perfect wife and mother and a regular Facebook updater.

Ingres Tech Blog - Is Barbie ready for an Engineering degree???

2010-02-19T20:45:20+00:00

I just saw this post today about Mattel offering a new Barbie doll decked out with her own laptop and bluetooth headset and thought, “is this what we really need to get more girls interested in science and technology fields?” My first instinct was no, I have always been around technology my entire life and I didn’t need a Barbie doll with a laptop to help me decide what I wanted to be when I grew up.

But then I remember taking my daughter in to my office years ago when she was only 4 and she sat in my assistant’s office chair. I asked why she chose there to sit there and she replied, “that is where girls sit, they get coffee and answer the phone for important men.” I woke up in an instant, and since that day, have tried very hard over the years to expose her to the many career opportunities that exist in the marketplace today. I find myself speaking at local conferences and volunteering at schools to encourage young women to look at engineering as a profession. I always wonder what more can we do to help expose our young girls to the fields of science and technology and to help guide them through these choices.

Whether they want to be a doctor, a lawyer, an assitant, an engineer, a school teacher, etc., these are all great choices, as long as it is their choice. Girls today can be anything they want, they just need to be exposed to all the opportunities available to them.

Still not sure that girls need a Barbie with a laptop and a bluetooth headset, but we do need to find creative ways to get girls more interested in technology related fields. Hats off to Mattel for trying a different angle on this one, let’s just get the Barbie doll to look like a ‘normal’ teenage girl though and maybe put an Open Source for Girls t-shirt on her.

We all just need to help them connect in whatever way is most comfortable for them to see all the oportunties that are out there today. We’ve come a long way, but we’re not sure Barbie is quite there yet.

/deb

ps – Morgan: this post is for you..

Nikos Vaggalis - iProgrammer - Type Systems Demystified

2010-02-19T07:57:00+00:00

Grant Croker - UK IUA 2010 Call for Papers Now Open

2010-02-16T16:36:53+00:00

It’s that time of the year again – the call for papers for the UK IUA June conference:

UK Ingres User Association Conference 2010
10th June 2010, London
www.iua.org.uk

Outlines or abstracts for presentations on Ingres, OpenROAD, open source, or any other Ingres-related topics are welcome. The theme for this year’s event is “Open Source Innovation” so any papers relating to Ingres and Open Source tools and products would be particularly welcome.

The UK IUA Committee invites anyone working with Ingres or OpenROAD, or related technologies to submit ideas for papers to be presented at this year’s annual conference. The conference will take place on 10th June 2010 in Central London (venue to be confirmed).

A sell-out crowd attended the high quality presentations at last year’s event, and with your assistance and contribution, we aim to make this year’s IUA Conference an even bigger success.

Outlines and abstracts can be submitted in any reasonable format (e.g. Word, plain text, Powerpoint, PDF, etc.). Please submit your ideas for papers via email to Ray Collins (ray.collins@iua.org.uk) by Monday, 12 April 2010 for evaluation by the conference paper selection committee. Note that you need only send an outline or proposal at this stage. You do not need to provide a complete presentation to be considered.

Notification of whether your paper has been selected or rejected will be sent by Friday 14 April 2010.

Topics we are particularly interested in hearing about this year:

VectorWise

Hardware and software consolidation, and virtualization

Applications developed with Open Source

Migrations to Open Source

Ingres Community Projects

Open Source economics

Management issues in Open Source

Productivity Tools

Security

Improving Performance

If you have any questions regarding this year’s 2010 Conference, the committee members are happy to assist. Please send all questions and queries to info@iua.org.uk.

Thank you to all who have supported the IUA by presenting at our previous Meetings, Special Events and the Annual Conference in the past, and for your continued interest and support of the UK IUA.

Some random posts

Roger Whitcomb - Community Tools Project rollout

2010-02-11T18:11:23+00:00

I have made a couple of presentations today, that is Feb. 11, 2010, which are the beginning of the community rollout of the Ingres DBMS Tools project. We received the "go-ahead" for the project from our CEO a couple of weeks ago and his first instruction was to get this out to the community for input. So, that's what we're doing.

The beginning of the project is here: Tools API Home - Ingres Community Wiki

I want to personally encourage anyone with an interest in Ingres DBMS Tools to participate in this project, by (at least) reading through the documents as they are posted and (hopefully) making comments or suggestions.

And I definitely need comments like, "You know, that's a good idea, BUT ....."

The recording of the first presentation is available for replay here: Ingres Administration Tools Webcast-20100211

Thanks!

Teresa King - Minor Ingres Community Wiki Refresh

2010-02-09T22:33:36+00:00

The Ingres Community Wiki has underwent a minor refresh to hopefully help folks find content a bit easier. Check out the new Main Page.

The main changes were to cut down on the number of content boxes, update descriptions for the remaining content boxes, and add a brief list of the type of information that could be found in the particular content box.

Another small change was to bold the "Drop Downs" to highlight that they exist as I was told my a number of folks that they scrolled right passed them and then tried to figure out where to locate information on the wiki using the content boxes and proceeded to get lost.

Other minor updates were made to some of the Application Development landing pages to also help improve the ability to locate information.

This continues to be a work in progress as we work on improving the Community Wiki.

Any comments and suggestions you may have are most welcome. The comments can be around layout, organization, or what is missing.

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 presentations 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 - 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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Planet Ingres

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Some random posts

Roger Whitcomb - Community Tools Project rollout

Teresa King - Minor Ingres Community Wiki Refresh

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

Grant Croker - Ingres Administration Tools Webcast

Related Posts

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

Ingres Tech Blog - Developing with PHP/ Zend

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

Eva Wong - UCOSP status report #2

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

Related posts

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

Ingres Tech Blog - Innovations in BI

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

Eva Wong - UCOSP status report #1

Andrew Ross - 2009 annual report

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

Eva Wong - UCOSP code sprint day #3

Eva Wong - UCOSP code sprint day #1

Eva Wong - Yay, SQL implementation in action!

Eva Wong - I'm back with Ingres again

Emma McGrattan - Ingres through the Noughties

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

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

Andrew Ross - Site updated

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

Ingres Tech Blog - Views from Open Source for America

Ingres Tech Blog - Tidbits for your Stockings

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