Vectorising database queries can give a seventy times performance increase, says open source vendor Ingres    By: Peter Judge

Open source company Ingres has released a vector version of its database, which it claims speeds up database operations enough to reduce the equipment required and greatly extend the use of realtime analytics.

Ingres announced VectorWise last year, a rewrite of the kernel of its database, which promises to speed up database activities by up to 70 times, by “vectorising” queries so processors can handle multiple activities at the same time. Ingres executives promised last year that the technology would change business processes - and says the released product now has customer feedback which backs up that claim.

Faster analytics for big users

Customer have been testing Ingres VectorWise for Linux for the last six months, and found that it gives performance gains of up to seventy times over existing database and analytic servers on massive data sets, chief executive Roger Burkhardt (left) told eWEEK Europe in London.

“We knew it worked last year, the question was, can we integrate it with databases and how will it perform in the hands of customers?”, said Burkhardt. “We’re delighted to find the real figures are the same as the results in the lab.”

Currently the big delay between a request and a delivered analytics report reduces the confidence with which users treat business analytics, he said.

The product will be used to deliver analytics work that might otherwise have required a specialised database box, such as one from Teradata said Burkhardt, and may also allow analytics use where customers would not have considered it before.

Other database vendors could adopt similar technology in theory, but would have to radically rewrite databases with millions of lines of installed code. Burkhardt predicted that Ingres had several years advantage, and in the meantime other vendors would find ways to get the word “vector” into their marketing materials, he predicted.

Among the users quoted at the VectorWise launch, business intelligence company Datamatics ported an application form Oracle and found it ran 70 times faster, according to Datamatics managing director Michael Thuleweit, who also liked the fact that being open source made Ingres cheaper.

“The speed is blindingly fast right out of the box and it eliminates layers of work that had to be done in the past,” said Roy Hann at systems integrator Rational Commerce.