Ingres: Vector Databases Are Real

“If you get ten-x out of the same processor, for our business model that’s great. We charge a subscription and we’re very happy for people to have reduced prices,” he said. Companies like Oracle, who get paid licence fees based on how much hardware the customer uses, might be less keen, he said.

“Can you imagine the engineer goes to Larry [Ellison of Oracle] and says, ‘Hey, I’ve got a great idea. If we stop doing anything else and spend the next three years rewriting the product, we could actually reduce our revenue by 90 percent’?” he asked. “I’d love to be a fly on the wall at that meeting.”

And now, with Oracle selling hardware from its Sun acquisition, this would make it even less likely to promote efficiencies, Burkhardt added.

Ingres has got VectorWise into mainstream use much quicker than comparable technologies, he said.  Column stores, for instance, are based on research done in 1995, but are currently being touted by SAP as the way forward, said Burkhardt. “Fifteen years later, it becomes mainstream”.

By contrast, VectorWise is based on research from 2004. “When they started in 2004, even though they had previously written MonetDB, they started with zero code.”

Modern micrprocessors can do many things in parallel, even on a single core – as long as the software is tuned to support it – though Burkhardt is quick to point out that there is no dependency on any particular architecture. “It’s written in standard C code, but so the compiler can take advantage of each particular chip.”

It works on all kinds of x86 chips (both from Intel and AMD), and Ingres has also done lots of work on Itanium processors, says Burkhardt.

It works on RISC and CISC processors – although “we haven’t spent a great deal of time optimising for Sun SPARC,” he said. He gave an evasive no comment when asked about IBM’s Power architecture.

Open source beats consolidation

The fastest growing platforms are open source, he said proudly, but large systems can be hard to move to open source, even if it saves in the long term, because users are often tied into contracts which are expensive to get out of.

That issue continues, but Burkhardt sees some changes happening as the industry consolidates. Oracle’s bundling of hardware is one issue, but SAP buying Sybase is another. There are many smaller ERP companies using SAP as the basis of their products, he said – and they now are about to find that their major competitor owns that technology.

“‘Do I really want to drag a SAP sales person in on every sales prospect?,’ they will ask,” said Burkhardt.

By contrast, the open source players have a long-established practice of non-competition: “Neither Red Hat, Novell or Ingres compete in the application space. We can provide a complete stack for an ISV to put a business app on Java.

Public sector support for open source has been mostly lip service,  but Burkhardt believes the new coalition government in the UK will follow through and start to demand real movement, partly on the basis of an article in the Times from February , by George Osborne, now the Chancellor of the Exchequer, which apparently got a response from the previous government’s CIO.

“There are four stages,” said Burkhardt. The first – like Britain – is when people talk about it but not much happens. The next step is somewhere like Hungary where open source has a quota. Beyond that, countries like Jordan actively fund open source (and uses Ingres for preference, we are told). The ideal situation is happening in India, which gives preference to open source, and IT providers pitch it actively.