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
Intelligent Enterprise’s Editors’/Editor’s Choice list for 2010
As he has before, Intelligent Enterprise Editor Doug Henschen
- Personally selected annual lists of 12 “Most influential” companies and 36 “Companies to watch” in analytics- and database-related sectors.
- Made it clear that these are his personal selections.
- Nonetheless has called it an Editors’ Choice list, rather than Editor’s Choice.
(Actually, he’s really called it an “award.”)
Comments on the Gartner 2009/2010 Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrant
At intervals of little over a year, Gartner Group publishes a Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrant. Gartner’s 2009 data warehouse DBMS Magic Quadrant — actually, January 2010 — is now out.* For many reasons, including those I noted in my comments on Gartner’s 2008 Data Warehouse DBMS Magic Quadrant, the Gartner quadrant pictures are a bad use of good research. Rather than rehash that this year, I’ll merely call out some points in the surrounding commentary that I find interesting or just plain strange. Read more
VectorWise, Ingres, and MonetDB
I talked with Peter Boncz and Marcin Zukowski of VectorWise last Wednesday, but didn’t get around to writing about VectorWise immediately. Since then, VectorWise and its partner Ingres have gotten considerable coverage, especially from an enthusiastic Daniel Abadi. Basic facts that you may already know include:
- VectorWise, the product, will be an open-source columnar analytic DBMS. (But that’s not quite true. Pending productization, it’s more accurate to call the VectorWise technology a row/column hybrid.)
- VectorWise is due to be introduced in 2010. (Peter Boncz said that to me more clearly than I’ve seen in other coverage.)
- VectorWise and Ingres have a deal in which Ingres will at least be the exclusive seller of the VectorWise technology, and hopefully will buy the whole company.
- Notwithstanding that it was once named something like “MonetDB,” VectorWise actually is not the same thing as MonetDB, another open source columnar analytic DBMS from the same research group.
- The MonetDB and VectorWise research groups consist in large part of academics in Holland, specifically at CWI (Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica). But Ingres has a research group working on the project too. (Right now there are about seven “highly experienced” people each on the VectorWise and Ingres sides, although at least the VectorWise folks aren’t all full-time. More are being added.)
- Ingres and VectorWise haven’t agreed exactly how VectorWise and Ingres Classic will play together in the Ingres product line. (All of the obvious possibilities are still on the table.)
- VectorWise is shared-everything, just as Ingres is. But plans — still tentative — are afoot to integrate VectorWise with MapReduce in Daniel Abadi’s HadoopDB project.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Database compression, Ingres, MonetDB, Open source, Theory and architecture, VectorWise | 9 Comments |
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: Read more
| 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. Read more
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.