Whoever said the finish line is the end of the race clearly has never
participated in an Ingres Code Sprint. Ingres, the leading provider of
open source database management software and pioneer of the New
Economics of IT, hosted the Ingres Code Sprint, a two-day event held
last week in advance of the UK Ingres Users Association Annual
Conference in London. Ingres Code Sprint brought together customers,
partners, and Ingres engineers to design, code, and create new features.
As a result of the two-day code-fest, compelling new features will now
be added to the Ingres product line.
“We achieved great results this year and the diversity of companies and
developers made the London event a tremendous success,” said Emma
McGrattan, senior vice president of engineering, Ingres, and organizer
of the Ingres Code Sprint. “It’s a testament to the open source
community when we can get together and make improvements on features and
programs that are being used every day, by the people who depend on
them.”
Ingres set up build environments using pre-configured virtual machines
that could be run on a laptop or in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
(Amazon EC2). Teams, including representatives from EDS, AAH
Pharmaceuticals, Bording Data and Oxford University, experimented with
coding and debugging. Experienced Ingres engineers were on hand to
provide mentoring and assistance.
“I’ve made a number of contributions to Ingres since attending last
year’s code sprint, and was very excited to work side-by-side with
Ingres engineers again this year. The knowledge I’ve gained has been
instrumental in my work at Oxford University,” said Martin Bowes,
database administrator, Oxford University, and open source coordinator
for the UK Ingres Users Association. “The features that have come out of
this year’s event, such as the ability to call out to the operating
system from the SQL terminal monitor and the new soundex routine,
illustrate what can be done when the community shares ideas.”
Some of the larger scale features that were implemented during Ingres
Code Sprint include:
Drupal on Ingres – Using an Amazon EC2 environment a
pre-configured Amazon Machine Image was created that combines Ingres and
Drupal in a ready-to-run configuration.
Compressed Backups – An option was added to the Ingres backup
utility that compresses the backup set resulting in significant savings
in large database environments.
Logging Database activity:
Enforced logging of all database activity – A list of databases
for which transaction logging cannot be disabled can now be specified.
Disable logging when copying or unloading a database – To speed
up unloading or copying databases, Ingres now provides the ability to
not log activity while these actions are in progress.
Command History Recall – The Ingres SQL utility for Linux and
UNIX now provides a command history that enables the user to recall and
replay a list of previous commands.
Advanced Soundex Routine – Ingres now offers a new soundex
routine based on the Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex algorithm, which provides
for a far more reliable and accurate encoding of data.
Ingres Code Sprint was attended by community members from the UK, US,
Canada, and Denmark. The next Ingres Code Sprint in the UK is already
scheduled for June 2010.
About Ingres Corporation
Ingres is the leading open source database management company. We are
the world’s second largest open source company and the pioneer of the
New Economics of IT, providing open source solutions at dramatically
reduced cost than proprietary software vendors. As a leader in The New
Economics of IT, Ingres delivers low cost and accelerated innovation to
more than 10,000 customers worldwide.
Ingres is a registered trademark of Ingres Corporation. All other
trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein
belong to their respective companies.
Ingres Corporation
Sherry Lowe, 650-587-5544
Corporate
Communications
sherry.lowe@ingres.com
or
AxiCom
Cohn & Wolfe (for Ingres)
Alenka Gobec, +44 (0)20 8392 4058
alenka.gobec@axicom.com