state of the database nation
A Gartner/IDC report summarising the state of the database market in 2005 contains some interesting nuggets of information.
The database market is still growing at 9.4% (which surprised me a little).
OpenSource databases account for less than 1% of the market but are growing fast (47%).
The Linux platform (thanks mainly to Oracle) is showing the strongest growth (84%).
Despite these two statements of fact, Oracle are not perturbed by the threat of OpenSource (pass the salt cellar).
Market share:
- Oracle - 44.6%
- IBM - 21.4%
- Microsoft - 16.8%
- OpenSource (MySQL, Ingres) - 1%
New York nostalgia
Back in 1995, I was a software engineer for Ingres, working on the OS/2 port. A merchant bank had a serious, intermittent, non-reproducible problem and Computer Associates kindly bought me a ticket to New York to go and help them. The ticket was an open return. I thought 'That's nice. That's so I can extend my stay for a lovely weekend city break with my wife'. The truth was that it was an open return as I was staying onsite until the problem was resolved [ PH was right. I am naive ] I duly took a black briefcase with a magnetic tape with the complete source code, an umbrella and a bowler hat. The tape was slightly too big for the briefcase and it was a struggle to shut it. Halfway through the flight, I decided to read some of the background to the long standing issue. The briefcase wouldn't open. It was jammed. I was petrified that US Customs were going to ask me to open it. Thankfully, they didn't. When I arrived at the plush offices of the prestigious merchant bank, I was greeted like royalty. The client was very impressed that an 'engineer all the way from London' had come to visit them. They offered me tea, coffee or water and looked perplexed when I said 'Err - have you got a Swiss Army Knife ?'. A suitable tool was produced and they looked on in amazement as I butchered the lock and held the mag tape aloft. Come to think of it, I didn't have a laptop so I must have compiled the Ingres product on their server. My other memories of this trip are going to a cinema in Times Square to watch 'Pulp Fiction' in an effort to stay awake and beat jet lag. Somehow, this seemed to enhance the cinematic experience further. Then I called home, trying to find out the United score against Crystal Palace. People kept telling me 'Oh you haven't heard about Cantona. God it was absolutely unbelievable. He was sent off, leapt into the crowd and attacked a Palace fan with a Kung Fu kick'. I didn't believe a word of it and never got to find out the actual score (1-1) until I returned home. And the actual bug - it was a one liner. A race condition introduced by a misplaced #ifdef.Ingres, OpenIngres and OpenSource
I used to work for Ingres (in London) who were a fantastic company to work for. Amazingly, they are the only company I have ever worked for to use newsgroups for internal technical discussions and knowledge sharing instead of email aliases. I once read that processing an individual email costs a company 10 cents.In the early 90's, Ingres was under commercial pressue from another large relational database vendor, Oracle. Instead of responding to this challenge, Ingres tended to 'fiddle while Rome burned', discuss the API naming convention by committee and stoutly defend the technical purity of page level locking (Oracle supported row level locking and capitalised heavily) from a lofty ivory tower.
Eventually, Computer Associates took over Ingres which most staff viewed as the end of the world. The truth was that CA saved Ingres from Chapter 11 (bankruptcy).
Although I had never visited Alameda and Islandia (Ingres' and CA's respective corporate headquarters), I still have this vision of hard nosed businessmen in sharp suits invading the Alameda campus to interview all these bearded techies in sandals.
On the day of the takeover, Oracle parked a truck outside Ingres' UK offices with a billboard 'Oracle are hiring now'. The story got a lot of coverage in the UK computer press. Once again, superb marketing from Oracle.
The Ingres engineers left the company in droves, formed self-help groups and arranged annual wakes to commemorate the anniversary of the black day.
CA subsequently rebranded the product OpenIngres but it largely disappeared from view into CA's vast portfolio of thousands of different software products.
So, it was nice to see Ingres back in the news this week as CA announced that Ingres Corporation will be once again be a separate company and the product will be available as an Open Source database.
Page: 1