Massive speed boost for Ingres databases

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 29 July 2009 13:52

IT Industry - Development

The approach taken by VectorWise means that the CPU can run at 100 percent utilisation rather than idling while waiting for data from disk or main memory, he explained.

Ingres is currently looking for beta test sites for the new engine, but they are likely to be drawn from the Americas and Europe rather than Asia Pacific due to time zone issues, Leonidas told iTWire.

But a large-scale beta is likely by the end of the year, and the technology is expected to appear in an Ingres product by mid-2010.

It will likely be offered as an extra-cost subscription item on top of Ingres. The plan is to charge on a capacity basis, but whether that will be per-CPU or some other measure has not been settled.

The company is committed to releasing the engine as an open source product, probably in the medium term, Leonidas said.

"We see real potential around analytics and providing personal analytics," he told iTWire. While 'cube' based products are designed for predetermined queries, the VectorWise technology will allow ad hoc queries on commodity hardware that previously required expensive, special-purpose systems such as those from Teradata for acceptable response times.

VectorWise (the organisation) is a spinout from the Dutch research institute Centrum Wiskunde and Informatica (CWI). CWI alumni include noted computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra, and the institute is the home of the Python language.

"We are very excited that future Ingres products coming out of this collaboration will bring the VectorWise technology to market undiluted, without compromises. The business model of Ingres ensures continued open innovation," said Peter Boncz, CWI scientist and VectorWise co-founder.

The project was also supported by Intel.

"The VectorWise project and resulting new software combined with the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series and new Intel microarchitecture, codenamed Nehalem, delivers breakthrough performance in data analytics processing, and lowers TCO for the enterprise," said Kumar Balasubramanian, senior director, software and services group, Intel Corporation.