Ramblings from the bit bucket » conference

Vectorise your data

notnull — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 06:39:41 +0000

I mentioned in a previous post UK IUA 2010 that Ingres announced the release of Ingres VectorWise. During the announcement was a live demonstration using the Ingres Database Workbench; recorded for posterity.

UK IUA 2010

notnull — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 07:26:40 +0000

This year’s IUA conference; a crammed packed one day event with 5 streams of sessions with keynotes from Ingres‘ CEO Roger Burkhardt, Novell‘s Director of Product Management Dr. Gerald Pfeifer and Talend‘s François Mero.

Ingres announced the release of Ingres VectorWise with a “see it to believe it” live demonstration; identical analytical queries run on a closed source DBMS (DBX) on 50 million rows and Ingres VectorWise on 100 million rows of data. Don’t hold your breath for DBX returning in around 52 seconds, but don’t blink with Ingres VectorWise or you’ll miss it returning in just under 2 seconds. Analytical queries with large data sets are the target and the audience was encouraged to try it out for themselves using their own data and sharing their “vectorised” findings.

In conjunction with the Ingres VectorWise announcement; Novell showed SuSE Studio with ability to create SuSE JeOS (Just enough Operating System) appliances that include Ingres; Talend announced the availability of a set of Ingres VectorWise connectors for Talend.

Joe Kronk and Emma McGrattan provided a debriefing for this year’s pre-conference code sprint. 30 people attended 4 focus areas, Ingres server, migration wizard toolkit, management tools and OpenROAD.

Rick van der Lans, winner of last year’s Ingres Community Award, presented the award to this year’s winner Karl Schendel. Congratulations Karl.

The conference provided many informative sessions and an ideal environment for networking.

Mark 07/Jun/2011 in your calendars for next year’s conference.

Eclipsecon 2010 – day4

notnull — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 09:03:05 +0000

Another session packed day kicked off by a rousing keynote from Robert C. Martin of Object Mentor Inc. entitled “Software Professionalism and the Art of Saying “No”. Robert touted a common sense approach to developing tests and software (and the order is important here). Being in the software industry for so long most/all of his generic quotes from management sounded very familiar and after each one Chris and I looked at each other and smiled.

The day continued with the same intensity as the preceding 3 days culminating in the closing session where the conference was wrapped up and the winners of prizes announced. Unexpectedly, I won a prize (looking like a real geek) for voter feedback; having been to many conferences I liked the system of soliciting feedback at Eclipsecon, making use of the +1, 0, -1 voting system.

This was my first ever Eclipsecon and the Eclipse Foundation Conference Committee organized a fantastic event in my opinion. Now I’ll have to try and get to Eclipse Summit Europe, just to see how they follow that.

EclipseCon 2010 – day2

notnull — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 01:59:14 +0000

This morning saw a keynote presentation from Jeet Kaul (formally of Sun) and Steve Harris of Oracle. With the new developments in the pipeline for Java SE and Java EE it seems that Oracle’s Java is set to be all pervasive in devices ranging from the mobile platform and beyond to desktop and server.

Demonstrations of simpler application deployment on Glassfish with Java modules or OSGi plug-ins together with annotated EJB integration showed how Java is loosing its ‘complex to use’ shackles. A quick JavaFX demonstration demonstrating video and audio support could mean the same deployment format for desktop to embedded devices and provide a replacement to Silverlight and Flash.

During my existence as a conference attendee I have never before experienced the lunch practice of rewarding with beer the filling of places at a table; that is until today. Thanks to Adrian Mos (the presenter on Mangrove SOA modelling framework that I attended) who diligently recruited people to sit at our table resulting in the awarding of beer served for lunch.

The Google presentations on Web toolkit and app engine were well attended, so well attended there wasn’t even standing room and I couldn’t get in. From the description of the atmosphere and odour in the room from a colleague I think I had a disappointing but lucky escape.

Now I’m slowly getting my head around some of the terms and the architectures the fog is slowly clearing.

Some random stuff

EclipseCon 2010 – day1

notnull — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 15:13:44 +0000

It has been a busy opening day at EclipseCon 2010. I have been able to attend some lightning talks (~25 minutes) where a synopsis of a later presentation is given. Gives you an idea of the forthcoming content.

The first session of the day involved an introductory presentation on the e4rover challenge

– translation, control a remote vehicle in a Mars terrain simulation using the current version of Eclipse e4 with driving controls.

Followed by a three hour tutorial on “Working with OSGi” that developed “Toast” a sample fleet management application. Many of the presentations are highly technical and domain specific so finding presentations for a newbie like me is a challenge. Luckily, the lightning talks are 12.5 to 25 minutes of introduction to pitch for more detailed presentations later in the week.

What is striking is that some of the project proposals can have overlap with each other and compete for community attention. A point raised in the Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF) panel discussion was the difficulty in picking a project for an application and being sure that a project is kept active.

A project proposal called Eclipse Scout is being an application framework and SDK that is being made open source by a Swiss Company BSI who have used it to create their own CRM application. I noted their intention to integrate with Jasperserver but the lack of Ingres on their database connectivity slide. I raised it with the presenter Matthias Zimmermann who said the only reason was lack of expertise in their engineering. An opportunity to get in on the ground floor I think.

Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) was another lightning talk by the project lead Rob Ganor. I caught up with Rob and spoke to him about the latest developments in PTD. Incidentally, it’s moved on quite a way since the early syntax highlighting PHP editor. It now includes integration with xDebug or Zend debugger and path management. Adding the ability to provide code assist for the Ingres PHP driver would improve productivity and details on how to are on the wiki page.

The day ended with a short Eclipse Data Tools Platform (DTP) BoF meeting where we met with members of the project leadership. Brian Fitzpatrick informed us the Ingres Database Workbench had been submitted into DTP Enablement, so not part of the release stream but available from the source tree.

Some random stuff

UK IUA Conference 2009

notnull — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 08:36:13 +0000

Another successful and worthwhile conference hosted by the UK Ingres User Association wrapped up Tuesday evening following a day cram packed with keynotes speeches and presentations. Most notably, this year’s keynote speakers were Roger Burqhart, Phillip Andrew from RedHat and Dr. Ian Howells from Alfresco each with a similar message; Open source is a key influence in the New Economics of IT. The most poignant part of the message was that in the current economic climate a subscription based payment model releases funds in a restrictive IT budget earmarked for software licenses for delivering new projects. The subscription payment moves purchasing software from a capital expenditure to an operational expenditure.

Emma McGrattan reported on the preceding code sprint some details of which are here http://blogs.planetingres.org/notnull/2009/06/10/ingres-code-sprint-09/ and Bill Maimone gave a glimpse of some of the projects that are currently in development both internally and in conjunction with the community. His live demonstration was hampered by Windows but he showed a new table structure type which running on a laptop out performed MS SQL Server running on a large server environment. Other developments include MVCC and long object names, more available at http://community.ingres.com/forum/blogs/stephenb/4-whats-happening-dbms-group.html.

In a amended plenary agenda, Rick van der Lans was presented with an award for ‘Contribution to the Ingres Community’ and was available to autograph copies of the newest addition to the Ingres bookshelf for over 20 years http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-sql-guide-to-ingres/6608333.

The afternoon breakout agenda contained more presentations than one person could attend. I chose !EasyIngres, Multiple Simultaneous Assignment, Ingres 9.2 features and Ingres 9.3 and roadmap.

!EasyIngres a simple pre-configured bundle of the components required to start developing with PHP on Windows. A community development mentored by Bruno Bompar; the project is starting to look at a similar Linux bundle.

Multiple Simultaneous Assignment a presentation on the research being carried out by Adrian Hudnott at Warwick University. I attended this presentation despite being warned by colleagues that this presentation would make my brain hurt and I can confirm that it did indeed make my brain hurt.

Doug Inkster presented the new features available in Ingres 9.2 and some of the new features in 9.3. Features such as cached dynamic queries and table auto structure. Cached dynamic queries takes a prepared query and hashes the query text and uses it to identify a cached query plan removing the need to optimize the query again. Of particular benefit for queries which have long compilation times and short execution times.

Table auto structure implements a different default table structure and enforcement of primary keys. The default table structure is heap and unique constraints are enforced with a secondary index. With table auto structure enabled during a CREATE TABLE statement the primary key or unique constraint is used for a B-tree base table structure removing the need for the secondary index. Previously this would have been achieved using the MODIFY and ALTER TABLE statements after the table had been created.

For the 9.3 and beyond presentation by Christine Normile, I attempted to keep notes on the community wiki http://community.ingres.com/wiki/UK_IUA_2009#9.4_Features and live on IRC #ingres logs available http://irc.planetingres.org/%23ingres.2009-06-09.log.html.

The conference closed with the announcement that next year’s conference will start on June 08 2010 and maybe a 2 day event.

I hope to see you all there.

Ingres Code Sprint 09

notnull — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:57:47 +0000

Following the popularity and attendance at last year’s code sprint a repeat of the event was held on the two days prior to the UK IUA. The objective of the event was to introduce, and in some cases re-introduce, the sprinters to the Ingres source code and build environment; either a pre-configured VMWare virtual machine provided on a flash drive or the same image running as a machine in Amazon EC2 if required.

Projects compiled from the community and from other sources were considered and ranked according to the expertise in the room.

In no particular order they are:

Improved SOUNDEX() function Daitch Mokotoff
Default to enable command history in terminal monitor on Linux and UNIX
Drupal with Ingres running in Amazon EC2
Pull ABF parser into the terminal monitor
CASE statements in ABF
IF statements within the terminal monitor
Rename Column
Bit column
optimizedb from within SQL
createdb from within SQL (Paul and Alex)
Online sysmod
DBfunctions as well as db procedures. Difference between procedures only return a status
Storing a QEP so that you can reference it later
Renamedb
ckpdb – include the ability to use bzip2/gzip for compressed checkpoints
Incremental checkpoint
copydb with no logging
Utility to map process ids to gcc port numbers
List databases that you don’t want to use no logging
SQL Terminal monitor \s[hell] syntax to be extended to: \s[hell] [/full/path/to/file|{shell command;...}]

Projects were assigned and investigated and were quickly excluded if proved more challenging and time consuming than the available two days. Look out for the design documents for some of the implementation coming soon, take a look at the tickets from Jun 7 and 8 at http://bugs.ingres.com/timeline.

I worked with Roy Simon from Boarding Data A/S, taking a copy Drupal 6.1 which included updates for using Ingres built from the iuasprint09 SVN branch as its repository. We also built the Ingres PHP driver with the latest patch.

All of the pre-requisites were installed and configurations updated so that when the machine is started, Ingres is started as a service and Drupal’s installation wizard is available by directing a Web browser to the Drupal Web page. Once we had it running correctly, I used the Amazon Web Services (AWS) plug-in in Eclipse and created an Amazon Machine Image (AMI).

Although more an exercise in packaging than coding it was still satisfying to launch a machine in the Amazon Cloud and just start using it.

These early sprints are a way to have a guided tour of the Ingres source code with people who work with it every day. I look forward to seeing you at the next one, which may be before the next IUA 08/Jun/2010.

Heraldic Enterprise Content Management

notnull — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:46:06 +0000

On February 25th the parents of the Ingres Icebreaker ECM Appliance announced its availability; the holistic product of Ingres Icebreaker and Alfresco Document Management Software.

Although we immediately started on our next project the team did take a few moments to look up from the keyboard. The release was well received by the press and the pundits, a sample of the articles from Information Week and InfoWorld .

Press coverage is great but the developer craves review from people who notice the subtleties and details in their designs that sets their software apart from the rest. The double edged sword of criticism can swing both positive and negative, but in open source development the test is being able to take the negative and openly engage in dialogue and improvement. One such dialogue has started with Enrico Bianco http://www.tenthline.com/blog/2009/03/04/first-impressions-ingres-icebreaker-ecm-appliance/ who already has experience with Alfresco’s products.

We hope to engage in many more.

UK IUA Spring Conference June 2008

notnull — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 21:23:15 +0000

This year’s conference was preceded by an experimental three day development code sprint. Read about the sprint, A Sprint to the Finish.

On the day of the conference the first half plenary speakers were Roy Hann, Simon Catlin, Emma McGrattan and Joe Kronk.

Roy focused on two topics, conference organization and community communications. There are now many channels for communication with the community and he is concerned about its potential dilution. A straw poll of the audience showed that only a handful of attendees didn’t use one of these channels. Conference venue and organization suffered some early setbacks and at one point was in danger of being cancelled. I for one am glad that it wasn’t.

Simon, a new member of the Ingres team, introduced himself to the community and highlighted the value of the Ingres proposition and the growing inertia of new business.

Emma reported on the Ingres DBMS development sprint and attempted to demonstrate the raw features all integrated into the one vitrual machine environment on her laptop; it is a tall order to demonstrate some things that aren’t usually demonstrable.
Some of the features:
Row auditing – add security auditing to insert, update and remove select filtering to audit everything.
Shuffled sequences – unique numeric values allocated in an irregular distribution.
copydb/unloaddb – align the command line parameters accepted both utilities.
Incremental ckpdb – proof of concept
trace points – enable logstat dump into dbmslog.
column rename – ALTER TABLE table_name RENAME COLUMN old_column TO new_column

I enjoyed the sprint and as the first was invaluable in imparting some knowledge about the Ingres source tree. I believe that the virtual machine that was used is to be made available from somewhere.

Joe reported on the Ingres OpenROAD development sprint and demonstrated some new additions to the Workbench and the runtime.
Some of the features:
Populated select field – modify appearance and behaviour by changing properties.
Resizable workbench window – The developer IDE was of fixed size is now fully resizeable.
Dockable workbench windows – Windows within the IDE can now be undocked.
Peristed workbench customization – Changes to the IDE are retained between restarts

The afternoon was divided into a packed five tracks and from what I could tell the presentations were well attended. I personally attended presentation by Rick van der Lans on the syntactic and semantic differences when porting applications between DBMS server. I spoke with him after the conference and mentioned the possibility of running an appliance track in the Red Stone Innovations Ingres Symposium planned for later this year.

I also attended a couple of the BI presentations by Deb Woods from Ingres product management and Andrew Lampitt from Jaspersoft on BI trends. Jaspersoft have just announced Jasperfoft v3 and use and management of Jasperserver has been enhanced so that more tasks can be completed all from the Web interface.

I couldn’t resist attending the IMA presentation by Mike Flower; an introduction to IMA to showing some of its possibilities. Since then we’ve discussed revamping it or adding a more in-depth look at IMA.

The conference came to a conclusion following the Q&A but the evening continued into the bar and for some even the West End.

Make a note in your diary, probably with a sprint preceding it.
UK IUA 2009 will be held on Tuesday June 9, 2009
Go to http://www.iua.org.uk/member/signup.php?product_id=1&hide_paysys=free to join the mailing list.

Some random stuff

Ingres Engineering Summit 2008

notnull — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 08:32:37 +0000

WOW! What a week.

I was lucky enough to participate in the Ingres Engineering Summit 2008 and I don’t think that a short blog could really do it justice. Ingres Engineering is distributed around the globe and this was an ideal opportunity to meet up and catch up. The summit was held in the Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, a really beautiful spot with great beaches, so they tell me and this year’s summit included a number of partners and academics who presented on a wide variety of topics. Jamie and Lisa who organized us all did an outstanding job, above and beyond the call of duty.

The engineering focus was on community and how to better engage it, interspersed with some very interesting presentations from our guests. Hugh Darwen presented on Project D, some academic work being undertaken by a doctorate student at the University of Warwick. CWI presented some interesting data for MonetDB/X100. Andy Grimm from rPath gave an interesting overview of their appliance technology and was able to help Paul Spencer from DM Solutions create one for MapServer.

A group of us joined forces to try and build a python driver for Ingres that uses the Data Access Message Protocol (DAMP) to communicate with the Data Access Server (DAS) and eliminate the need for the Ingres Net component. As part of this project we’ll also try out Mercurial for source control in a distributed environment. Unfortunately we didn’t get to show anything working but we’ll persevere with it.

The community related discussions can only be described as lively but they were thought provoking. Having worked with a few open source partners I know what I like; it’s just a matter of convincing the others

There was also a discussion of increasing the size of identifiers from the current 32 characters to 512. The change is simple but the impact will be quite widespread. After many suggestions of phased implementations and support for long and short names it was decided that we’d make a branch of the community code and make the change there; that would at least give everyone a working version that they could try and report back on. The SVN branch is ingres-main-long-identifiers from the ticket #23.

No doubt there will be pictures of us at work, rest and play; the links are starting to cascade into my in-box. If you see any that look like me, it is probably someone with an uncanny resemblance to yours truly.

I’m looking forward to the next one already.

Ramblings from the bit bucket » conference

Vectorise your data

Related posts

UK IUA 2010

Related posts

Eclipsecon 2010 – day4

Related posts

EclipseCon 2010 – day2

Some random stuff

EclipseCon 2010 – day1

Some random stuff

UK IUA Conference 2009

Related posts

Ingres Code Sprint 09

Related posts

Heraldic Enterprise Content Management

Related posts

UK IUA Spring Conference June 2008

Some random stuff

Ingres Engineering Summit 2008

Related posts