In 2009, open source company Ingres was talking up its VectorWise database technology, promising orders of magnitude of improvement over current database products by harnessing processors better. This month, the technology has been launched, and the chief executive, Roger Burkhardt met up with eWEEK Europe to talk about databases and open source in general.

“Last year, Intel checked us out, and we demonstrated between ten times and eighty times performance increase in the labs, by unlocking the power of modern chips,” he said. “Those are kind of absurd numbers, right?”

Analytics just got cheaper

“What we didn’t know was could we perform the integration with real-world databases, and would it perform in the hands of customers?” he said, “because real world customers’ work loads are not benchmark workloads.”

“We are delighted,” he said. With over a hundred early adopters, the feedback is “absolutely extraordinary - the same figures we had in the lab.” The database solves problems that could not be solved before, and also offers simplification, he said.

The simplification angle was unexpected. “Performance is critical, but simplicity is also important,” he said, saying that cheaper analytics could produce a revolution simliar to when PCs brought spreadsheets within the reach of ordinary users.

One user had a 15 dimensional analysis, said Burkhardt, and ended up using a single table 350 columns wide: “He was amazed how fast it worked.” And it’s also faster to develop and deliver this way, he said.

At present, users have to “wait till the high priesthood have built special schemas” before they get analytics queries run. With VectorWise, they should be able to run those queries at will, he said. “This really is an industry breakthrough - we see nothing else like this in the market.”

By making analytics cheap and quick, it also enables a “new class of analytics applications”, where the analytics is embedded in the application, instead of sitting in a paper report on a desk somewhere.

It also allows companies to put off big purchases of database hardware - it promises to compete with the expensive stuff but using general purpose hardware. “We’re focused on the mid-tier of the market - datamarts holding one to ten terabyte of data.”

It’s also going to have a green message, since it reduces the amount of hardware (and in paritcular disk drives) but he doesn’t have benchmarks yet. One case study has Ingres VectorWise replace an eight processor, 144 disk system, with a two processor system using four disks. “There’s a big opportunity to reduce costs,” he said. “There is an awful lot of ‘busy work’ going on in the servers.”

Where’s the competition?

If Ingres is really ahead in this, how long until rival companies catch up, we asked?

“This requires a fundamental  rewrite to the core of your product,” said Burkhardt. “The research goes back to 2004. I actually hope the rest of the industry catches up over time, because this is a good step forward - but we are not standing still.”

“I think it will come step by step over a number of years,” he said, “and the most immediate response will be marketing announcements where people pretend that they have it, by applying some slick gloss to some rather thin work.”

He predicts a lag, “while they decide whether the competition from people like us is enough to force them to go do this,” but also suggests companies which sell hardware might not be so keen to bring the technology to users.

“If you get ten-x out of the same processor, for our business model that’s great. We charge a subscription and we’re very happy for people to have reduced prices,” he said. Companies like Oracle, who get paid licence fees based on how much hardware the customer uses, might be less keen, he said.

“Can you imagine the engineer goes to Larry [Ellison of Oracle] and says, ‘Hey, I’ve got a great idea. If we stop doing anything else and spend the next three years rewriting the product, we could actually reduce our revenue by 90 percent’?” he asked. “I’d love to be a fly on the wall at that meeting.”

And now, with Oracle selling hardware from its Sun acquisition, this would make it even less likely to promote efficiencies, Burkhardt added.

Ingres has got VectorWise into mainstream use much quicker than comparable technologies, he said.  Column stores, for instance, are based on research done in 1995, but are currently being touted by SAP as the way forward, said Burkhardt. “Fifteen years later, it becomes mainstream”.

By contrast, VectorWise is based on research from 2004. “When they started in 2004, even though they had previously written MonetDB, they started with zero code.”

Modern micrprocessors can do many things in parallel, even on a single core - as long as the software is tuned to support it - though Burkhardt is quick to point out that there is no dependency on any particular architecture. “It’s written in standard C code, but so the compiler can take advantage of each particular chip.”

It works on all kinds of x86 chips (both from Intel and AMD), and Ingres has also done lots of work on Itanium processors, says Burkhardt.

It works on RISC and CISC processors - although “we haven’t spent a great deal of time optimising for Sun SPARC,” he said. He gave an evasive no comment when asked about IBM’s Power architecture.

Open source beats consolidation

The fastest growing platforms are open source, he said proudly, but large systems can be hard to move to open source, even if it saves in the long term, because users are often tied into contracts which are expensive to get out of.

That issue continues, but Burkhardt sees some changes happening as the industry consolidates. Oracle’s bundling of hardware is one issue, but SAP buying Sybase is another. There are many smaller ERP companies using SAP as the basis of their products, he said - and they now are about to find that their major competitor owns that technology.

“‘Do I really want to drag a SAP sales person in on every sales prospect?,’ they will ask,” said Burkhardt.

By contrast, the open source players have a long-established practice of non-competition: “Neither Red Hat, Novell or Ingres compete in the application space. We can provide a complete stack for an ISV to put a business app on Java.

Public sector support for open source has been mostly lip service,  but Burkhardt believes the new coalition government in the UK will follow through and start to demand real movement, partly on the basis of an article in the Times from February , by George Osborne, now the Chancellor of the Exchequer, which apparently got a response from the previous government’s CIO.

“There are four stages,” said Burkhardt. The first - like Britain - is when people talk about it but not much happens. The next step is somewhere like Hungary where microsoft-1806″>open source has a quota. Beyond that, countries like Jordan actively fund open source (and uses Ingres for preference, we are told). The ideal situation is happening in India, which gives preference to open source, and IT providers pitch it actively.