Ingres boss talks up open source

THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE of open source database firm Ingres, Roger Burkhardt has compared the work his firm is doing to improve database performance on a chip with that of the developments seen in gaming over the past twenty years.

Burkhardt said that while other firms like Oracle charge through the nose for sluggish database systems, open source alternatives are gearing up to run rings round them. And all for just the price of a support contract.

"Look at videogames," he said. "We've gone from Pong to Grand Theft Auto 4. There have been some incredible breakthroughs - and why? Because all the major players have re-written their code to take advantage of modern chip technology. Chip technology has dramatically changed over the past twenty years but Oracle's architecture has stayed the same. VectorWise is the first piece of business software that really unlocks the capabilities of chip technologies".

Vectorwise, Ingres's forthcoming database technology, has been described as applying Moore's Law to databases and initial results have shown that it achieves more than 10-fold performance gains.

Burkhardt said that Ingres was able to get to this stage because of the use of the open source development model. He added, "Ingres is ready to release VectorWise from a technology perspective but at the moment it is a project and we have not announced general availability." That suggests the technology will see the light of day, if not when.

Vectorwise has created something of a buzz in the industry, and Burkhardt certainly thinks it's exciting. "20 years ago processors could access data from a RAM in one chip cycle, disks took about 500 cycles. Today it takes 300 cycles. We realised that the key to improving performance was getting data into memory. VectorWise keeps the data in the memory cache on the chip, and all processing happens on the chip. It's much faster," he said.

It is the open source model that makes these innovations possible while many other firms appear to be cutting back. Burkhardt said that although the recession might drive more enterprises to open source solutions, they would be rewarded with more than just cost savings. "We can innovate much more quickly than firms with thousands of engineers. Open source customers get no licence fees, no lock in, and superior technology."

However arrangements must be entered into with some caution and preferably some sort of support contract, adds the man who makes his living from doing just that. "In my previous job at the NYSE, I had 2000 staff working under me, but I wouldn't have wanted to have any of them be responsible for testing the millions of lines of code in an open source solution. It is a very specialist area and open source companies have the scale to support it." µ