Ingres
Analysis of relational database management system vendor Ingres and its products. Related subjects include:
- Open source database management systems
- (in Software Memories) Historical notes on Ingres
Ingres update
I talked with Ingres today. Much of the call was fluff — open-source rah-rah, plus some numbers showing purported success, but so finely parsed as to be pretty meaningless. (To Ingres’ credit, they did offer to let me talk w/ their CFO, even if they offered no promises as to whether he’d offer any more substantive information.) Highlights included:
| Categories: Data warehousing, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Ingres, MySQL, Open source, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Sybase | 6 Comments |
Database implications if IBM acquires Sun
Reported or rumored merger discussions between IBM and Sun are generating huge amounts of discussion today (some links below). Here are some quick thoughts around the subject of how the IBM/Sun deal — if it happens — might affect the database management system industry.
25 facts about Ingres, give or take a couple
Emma McGrattan of Ingres offers a “25 facts” post about Ingres. 24 really are about Ingres. Some are interesting (who knew Ingres still used a lot of Quel?). Some are if anything understated — e.g., there are lots of current CEOs who are Ingres alums (Dave Kellogg and Dennis Moore jump to mind). Only one is a real eyebrow-raiser.
Point 23 says “The average tenure of an Ingres Engineer is 15+ years.” On the other hand, Point 3 says “The longest serving member of Ingres staff is John Smedley who has been with us since June of 1987.” And most of Ingres’ technical staff left after Ingres was acquired by CA, which occurred a few months shy of 15 years ago. Reconciling all that is challenging.
Actually, I was dubious about a second claim too, namely that Ingres/Star was the first distributed DBMS; I thought that the distributed version of Tandem NonStop SQL actually predated it by a few years. But a somewhat contemporaneous article with a number of distributed DBMS dates shows my memory was wrong on that score.
| Categories: Ingres | 3 Comments |
Gartner’s 2008 data warehouse database management system Magic Quadrant is out
Gartner’s annual Magic Quadrant for data warehouse DBMS is out. Thankfully, vendors don’t seem to be taking it as seriously as usual, so I didn’t immediately hear about. (I finally noticed it in a Greenplum pay-per-click ad.) Links to Gartner MQs tend to come and go, but as of now here are two working links to the 2008 Gartner Data Warehouse Database Management System MQ. My posts on the 2007 and 2006 MQs have also been updated with working links. Read more
What leading DBMS vendors don’t want you to realize
For very high-end applications, the list of viable database management systems is short. Scalability can be a problem. (The rankings of most scalable alternatives differ in the OLTP and data warehouse realms.) Extreme levels of security can be had from only a few DBMS. (Oracle would have you believe there’s only one choice.) And if you truly need 99.99% uptime, there only are a few DBMS you even should consider.
But for most applications at any enterprise – and for all applications at most enterprises – super high-end DBMS aren’t required. There are relatively few applications that wouldn’t run perfectly well on PostgreSQL or EnterpriseDB today. Ingres and Progress OpenEdge aren’t far behind (they’re a little lacking in datatype support). Ditto Intersystems Cache’, although the nonrelational architecture will be off-putting to many. And to varying degrees, you can also do fine with MySQL, Pervasive PSQL, MaxDB, or a variety of other products – or for that matter with the cheap or free crippled versions of Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, and Informix.
What’s more, these mid-range database management systems can have significant advantages over their high-end brethren. Read more
Naming the DBMS disruptors
Edit: This post has largely been superseded by this more recent one defining mid-range relational DBMS.
I find myself defining a new product category – midrange OLTP/multipurpose DBMS. (Or just midrange DBMS for brevity.) Nothing earthshaking here; I’m simply referring to those products that: Read more
EnterpriseDB tries PostgreSQL-based Oracle plug-compatibility
Like Greenplum, EnterpriseDB is a PostgreSQL-based DBMS vendor with an interesting story, whose technical merits I don’t yet know enough to judge. In particular, CEO Andy Astor:
- Confirms that EnterpriseDB is OLTP-focused, unlike Greenplum. That said, they are also used for some reporting and so on. But they don’t run 10s-of-terabytes sized data marts.
- Claims EnterpriseDB has a high level of Oracle compatibility – SQL, datatypes, stored procedures (so that would be PL/SQL too), packages, functions, etc.
- Claims ANTs isn’t nearly as Oracle-compatible.
- Claims 50-100% better OLTP performance out of the box than vanilla PostgreSQL, due to auto-tuning.
Also, EnterpriseDB has added a bunch of tools to PostgreSQL – debugging, DBA, etc. And it provides actual-company customer support, something that seems desirable when using a DBMS. It should also be noted that the product is definitely closed-source, notwithstanding EnterpriseDB’s open-source-like business model and its close ties to the open source community.
| Categories: ANTs Software, Data warehousing, Emulation, transparency, portability, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Ingres, Mid-range, OLTP, Open source, Oracle, PostgreSQL | 1 Comment |
Ingres tries to become relevant again
Ingres has non-trivial resources – 300 employees, 10,000 “real” customers, and some additional large number of installations embedded in CA products. It has a fairly pure support-only open source revenue model, although there may be exceptions to that in cases such as the DATAllegro relationship.
Should anybody care?
Yes and no. To compete effectively in the mid-range OLTP relational database management system market, you need a product that’s much easier to administer than Oracle, and preferably easier even than Microsoft SQL*Server. Ingres doesn’t meet that standard. Until it does, it probably won’t have much of a market outside its current installed base. But some of Ingres’s strategies and directions are pretty clever, and may be interesting to people who’d never actually consider using Ingres technology. Specifically, Ingres has plans in the areas of appliances and database services, two subjects that are close to my heart.
| Categories: DATAllegro, Ingres | 2 Comments |
OLTP database management system market – the consensus isn’t ALL wrong (deck-clearing post #1)
Most of what I’ve written lately about database management seems to have been focused on analytic technologies. But I have a lot to say on the OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) side too. So let’s start by clearing the decks. Here’s a list of some consensus views that I in essence agree with:
- Oracle is the top of the line, and has nothing wrong with it other than cost of ownership and the non-joys of doing business with Oracle Corporation.
- DB2/mainframe is a fine product, but only if you like IBM mainframes.
- DB2/open systems is another fine product, but it’s hard to think of reasons to use it over Oracle.
- Microsoft SQL Server has great cost of ownership if you’re a Windows (server) shop anyway, especially on the administrative side. It does most but not all of what Oracle does.
- Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise is a lot like SQL Server, but without the Windows dependence or the great Microsoft tools. If you have it installed or are Chinese, you should strongly consider using it, but otherwise there are better alternatives.
- Progress’ DBMS is great if you don’t need any of the features it’s missing. Administration, for example, is a super-low-cost breeze. But why use it unless you’re also using the Progress development tools?
- Intersystems’ Cache’ is another fine mid-range product that involves buying into the vendors’ whole tool set – all the more so because it isn’t relational.
- Small-footprint embedded DBMS, from vendors such as Sybase’s iAnywhere division or Solid Information Technologies, are off in their own little world. Mainly, that world is telecom, with a satellite in medical devices, although other kinds of networked equipment also sometimes use these products.
- IBM’s non-DB2 database management products – IMS, Informix, etc. – are fine things to stick with until you have to change. Ditto products from Software AG, Computer Associates, Cincom, etc.
- MySQL Version 4 is an OLTP joke, but it’s a joke many people share. (Hey — a lot of blogs, including mine, run on Wordpress and MySQL 4.)
- Until Ingres is meaningfully marketed and sold outside its installed base, it’s not worth worrying about.
- PostgreSQL is more significant as the underpinning of other products — mainly EnterpriseDB in the OLTP space — than it is in its own right.
Myths about DATallegro, Ingres, open source, etc.
Sometimes, when one talks to a company about a close competitor, what one hears may not be 100% strictly accurate. Yesterday, I more than once heard claims that sounded oddly like “DATallegro has to open source whatever software it develops.” Today, DATallegro CEO Stuart Frost clarified as follows:
• DATallegro has no (little?) legal obligation to open source anything. Even the version of Ingres they use is not the GPL one.
• They do give a few enhancements back to Ingres (via open source?) rather than maintain them themselves.
• The whole MPP technology is proprietary, in every sense of “proprietary.” (For example, they use a whole different optimizer than Ingres’s. I’ve forgotten whether the Ingres optimizer is also left in place.)
| Categories: DATAllegro, Data warehouse appliances, Ingres, Memory-centric data management, Open source | 1 Comment |
Introduction to Greenplum and some compare/contrast
Netezza relies on FPGAs. DATallegro essentially uses standard components, but those include Infiniband cards (and there’s a little FPGA action when they do encryption). Greenplum, however, claims to offer a highly competitive data warehouse solution that’s so software-only you can download it from their web site. That said, their main sales mode seems to also be through appliances, specifically ones branded and sold by Sun, combining Greenplum and open source software on a “Thumper” box. And the whole thing supposedly scales even higher than DATallegro and Netezza, because you can manage over a petabyte if you chain together a dozen of the 100 terabyte racks.
Read more
| Categories: DATAllegro, Data warehouse appliances, Greenplum, Ingres, Netezza, Open source, PostgreSQL | 4 Comments |
Ingres’s questionable target market
Eric Lai of Computerworld interviewed Roger Burkhardt, new CEO of Ingres, and obviously did a bang-up job of asking him the tough “Who really are your target customers, and why would they buy from you?” questions. The answer, so far as I can tell, is “Large financial institutions writing new RDBMS apps that don’t need up-to-date functionality and don’t want to pay Oracle’s license fees.” Up to a point, that makes sense. Except for the “financial institutions” qualifier, it’s actually pretty obvious. I can’t imagine why any other new users would buy Ingres, which has been ever the bridesmaid, never the bride for the past 20 years.
Read more
| Categories: Ingres, Open source | 1 Comment |
DATallegro’s technical strategy
Few areas of technology boast more architectural diversity than data warehousing. Mainframe DB2 is different from Teradata, which is different from the leading full-spectrum RDBMS, which are different from disk-based appliances, which are different from memory-centric solutions, which are different from disk-based MOLAP systems, and so on. What’s more, no two members of the same group are architected the same way; even the market-leading general purpose DBMS have important differences in their data warehousing features.
The hot new vendor on the block is DATallegro, which is stealing much of the limelight formerly enjoyed by data warehouse appliance pioneer Netezza. (After some good early discussions, Netezza abruptly reneged on a promise a year ago to explain more about its technology workings to me, and I’ve hardly heard from them since. Yes, they’re still much bigger than DATallegro, but I suspect they’ve hit some technical roadblocks, and their star is fading.)
| Categories: DATAllegro, Data warehouse appliances, Ingres, Open source | 17 Comments |
Data warehouse appliances
If we define a “data warehouse appliance” as “a special-purpose computer system, with appliance administratibility, that manages a data warehouse,” then there are two major contenders: Netezza and DATAllegro, both startups, both with a small number of disclosed customers. Past contenders would include Teradata and White Cross (which seems to have just merged into Kognitio), but neither would admit to being in that market today. (I suspect this is a mistake on Teradata’s part, but so be it.) IBM with DB2 on the z-Series wouldn’t be properly regarded as an appliance player either, although IBM is certainly conscious of appliance competition. And SAP’s BI Accelerator does not persist data at this time.
In principle, the Netezza and DATAllegro stories are similar — take an established open source RDBMS*, build optimized hardware to run it, and optimize the software configuration as well. Much of the optimization is focused on getting data on and off disk sequentially, minimizing any random accesses. This is why I often refer to data warehouse appliances as being the best alternative to memory-centric data management. Beyond that, the optimizations by the two vendors differ considerably.
*Netezza uses PostgreSQL; DATAllegro uses Ingres.
Hmm. I don’t feel like writing more on this subject at this very moment, yet I want to post something urgently because there’s an IOU in my Computerworld column today for it. OK. More later.
| Categories: Companies and products, DATAllegro, DBMS product categories, Data warehouse appliances, IBM and DB2, Ingres, Memory-centric data management, Open source, SAP AG | Leave a Comment |
Two kinds of DBMS extensibility
Microsoft took slight exception to my claim that they lack fully general DBMS extensibility. The claim is actually correct, but perhaps it could lead to confusion. And anyhow there’s a distinction here worth drawing, namely:
There are two different kinds of DBMS extensibility.
The first one, which Microsoft has introduced in SQL Server 2005 (but which other vendors have had for many years) is UDTs (User-Defined Types), sometimes in other systems called user-defined functions. These are in essence datatypes that are calculated functions of existing datatypes. You could use a UDT, for example, to make the NULLs in SQL go away, if you hate them. Or you can calculate bond interest according to the industry-standard “360 day year.” Columns of these datatypes can be treated just like other columns — one can use them in joins, one can index on them, the optimizer can be aware of them, etc.
The second one, commonly known by the horrible name of abstract datatypes (ADTs), is found mainly in Oracle, DB2, and previously the Informix/Illustra products. Also, if my memory is accurate, Ingres has a very partial capability along those lines, and PostgresSQL is said to be implementing them too. ADTs offer a way to add totally new datatypes into a relational system, with their own data access methods (e.g., index structures). That’s how a DBMS can incorporate a full-text index, or a geospatial datatype. It can also be a way to more efficiently implement something that would also work as a UDT.
In theory, Oracle et al. expose the capability to users to create ADTs. In practice, you need to be a professional DBMS developer to write them, and they done either by the DBMS vendors themselves, or by specialist DBMS companies. E.g., much geospatial data today is stored in ESRI add-ons to Oracle; ESRI of course offered a speciality geospatial DBMS before ADTs were on the market.
Basically, implementing a general ADT capability is a form of modularity that lets new datatypes be added more easily than if you don’t have it. But it’s not a total requirement for new datatypes. E.g., I was wrong about Microsoft’s native XML implementation; XML is actually managed in the relational system. (More on that in a subsequent post.)
| Categories: Data types, IBM and DB2, Ingres, Microsoft and SQL*Server, Open source, Oracle, Theory and architecture | 2 Comments |
So how robust is Ingres?
CA is spinning off Ingres, more or less, to an investment fund led by Terry Garnett, who will also be interim of CEO. Now, I’ve given Terry a lot of grief over the decades. It started by accident, when I bashed his presentation of Lightyear at a 1984 party in Rosann Stach’s house (where we also used Jerry Kaplan as a subject for the Mindprober psychological analysis product — those were the days of goofy software!). Years later, I didn’t even recall that had been Terry until I was reminded. But in the early 1990s, when Terry and Jerry Baker were dueling at Oracle, I was firmly in the Jerry Baker camp, and believe I was right to this day. Still — be all that as it may, Terry knows DBMS and knows promotion, and if the company falls flat it won’t be because he screwed it up. He’s no dunce, and he’s been around DBMS a loooong time.
But how stands the product? Let’s flash back a decade, to when CA bought it. Ingres was a solid general-purpose RDBMS. But it was beginning to fall behind the technology power curve, especially on the data warehousing side. (For more detail, see my Ingres history post over in the Software Memories blog.) And then product development slowed to a crawl. Tony Gaughan, who ran the product for CA before the latest move, claims that they’ve actually done a good job on advancing the product on the OLTP side, perhaps to the point of comparability with Oracle9i, and certainly ahead of MySQL 5.0. I’m inclined to believe him, after applying some reasonable discount factor for expected puffery, in part because this wasn’t a high hurdle to cross. Over the past decade, the main action in high-end DBMS product enhancement has been in data warehousing and nontabular datatypes, not in OLTP.
Where Ingres definitely seems to lag is in data warehousing. E.g., there are no materialized views, and I bet that even if they have some of the index types such as bitmaps, star schemas, etc., the implementation, optimizer support, administrative support, and so on lag far behind that of Oracle and IBM. So again, the proper comparison for Ingres isn’t Oracle and IBM; it’s fellow open source vendor MySQL. Only — deserved or not, MySQL has a ton of momentum for such a small company, incuding an attractive product plan partially fueled by SAP.
Appliance vendor DATallegro makes a plausibiity argument that Ingres can be adapted for nontrivial data warehouse uses as well. But while that’s cool, and might even become persuasive once DATallegro has some happy, disclosed customers, it’s not the same as saying you want to put a big data warehouse into off-the-shelf Ingres.
So basically, I’m afraid that Ingres is going to appeal mainly to users who either already are making major use of it, or else have a huge problem with paying the license fees demanded by other vendors. I wish them well, and hope they kindle a spark somehow; but right now I don’t see where it would be coming from.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Ingres, MySQL, Open source | 2 Comments |
Down with database consolidation!
As with all changes in information technology, the move to DBMS2 will largely be one of evolution. But it does have a couple of revolutionary aspects.
Short-term, the biggest change is a renunciation of database and DBMS vendor consolidation. Consolidation never has worked, it never will work, and as data integration technologies keep improving it’s not that important anyway.
IBM and Oracle offer really great, brilliantly complex data warehousing technology. But if you want the most bang for the buck, forget about them, and go instead with a specialty vendor. Depending on the specifics of your situation, Teradata, Netezza, Datallego, WhiteCross, or SAP may offer the best choice, and that list could be even longer.
Similarly, for generic OLTP data management, cheap and/or open source options are getting ever more attractive. Microsoft is a serious contender for applications that previously only Oracle and IBM could handle, while MySQL and maybe Ingres are moving up the food chain right behind.
In many cases, these alternative technologies are lower-cost across the board: Lower purchase price, lower ongoing maintenance fees, and lower administrative costs.
So what, again, is the case for consolidation?
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Database diversity, IBM and DB2, Ingres, Kognitio, MOLAP, Memory-centric data management, Microsoft and SQL*Server, MySQL, Netezza, Open source, Oracle, SAP AG, Theory and architecture | Comments Off |
