Ingres Vectorwise smokes it!

I work in all markets of the database industry, from web & startup through the largest and most established enterprises.  And to be completely honest, the name Ingres has not come up in conversation very much at all.  10 years ago maybe more often, but recently not all that much.  But Ingres has been quietly ticking away.  Despite being largely off the radar, they still have a sizable and loyal customer base, global offices and a focused & dedicated management team.  And importantly they have an open source business model which actually appears to be working.

I wrote last year that their "behind the scenes" status had the potential to change.  Ingres had been very clever and worked out a partnership relationship with Peter Bonzc’s Vectorwise.  And that relationship was promising big things for data analytics from a price/performance perspective.  But at the time it was all promise and little in the way of substance had been produced.

But that has been changing.  A month or two back Ingres somewhat quietly launched their Beta program for the Ingres Vectorwise technology.  This technology, if you have not read about it before, combines an analytical column store and “vectorized processing” to give much greater throughput rates than previously possible on your existing hardware (Vectorwise is a single node solution i.e. not MPP) .

And I have started hearing feedback, and it is good.  Very good.  While Ingres Vectorwise isn’t fully baked yet, I have heard it is producing astounding performance results in early testing.  In one case I heard of <10TB real life production comparison test and Ingres Vectorwise smoked everything else they had tested.  And they have tested a lot of different market leading analytical platforms.

So I think this is the start of an Ingres’s comeback.  Certainly anyone looking at <10TB analytical platforms will be getting the recommendation that they at least look at Ingres Vectorwise from me.  I am looking forward to seeing what 2010/2011 brings for them.