Ingres history
Roland Bouman reminded us on Twitter of an old post I did on another blog about Ingres history, the guts of which was:
Ingres and Oracle were developed around the same time, in rapidly-growing startup companies. Ingres generally was the better-featured product, moving a little earlier than Oracle into application development tools, distributed databases, etc., whereas Oracle seems to be ahead on the most important attributes, such as SQL compatibility — Oracle always used IBM’s suggested standard of SQL, while Ingres at first used the arguably superior Quel from the INGRES research project. Oracle eventually pulled ahead on superior/more aggressive sales and marketing.
Then in the 1990s, Ingres just missed the DBMS architecture boat. Oracle, Informix, Microsoft, and IBM all came out with completely new products, based respectively on Oracle + Rdb, Informix + a joint Ingres/Sequent research project, Sybase, and mainframe DB2. Ingres’s analogous effort basically floundered, in no small part because they made the pound-wise, penny-foolish decision to walk away from a joint venture research product they’d undertaken with innovative minicomputer vendor Sequent in the Portland, OR area.
Computer Associates bought Ingres in mid-1994, and immediately brought me in to do a detailed strategic evaluation. (Charles Wang telephoned the day the acquisition closed, in one of the more surprising phone calls I’ve ever gotten, but I digress … Anyhow, the relevant NDA agreements, legal and moral alike, have long since expired.) There was nothing terribly wrong with the product, but unfortunately there was nothing terribly right either. Aggressive investment — e.g., to get fully competitive in parallelism and object/relational functionality, the two biggest competitive differentiators in those days — would have been no guarantee of renewed market success.
Notwithstanding the economic question marks, CA surprised me with its enthusiasm for taking on these technical challenges. But another problem reared its head — almost all the core developers left the company. (If you weren’t willing to sign a noncompete agreement that was utterly ridiculous in those days, at least in the hot Northern California market, you couldn’t keep your job post-merger.) And so, like almost all CA acquisitions outside of the system management/security/data center areas, Ingres fell further and further behind the competition.
Some of the same information made it into my post here on Ingres history later the same year, but for some reason not all did.
| Categories: Database management systems, Ingres, Oracle | 1 Comment |
Those who forget history are doomed to believe it is recurring
The top PostgreSQL-related April Fool’s joke this year, which seems to have successfully pranked at least a few people, was that Postgres is dropping SQL in favor of an alternative language QUEL.
Folks, QUEL was the original language for Postgres. And Ingres. And, more or less, Teradata.* I’d guess Britton-Lee too, but I don’t recall for sure.
*Once upon a distant time, when I was a cocky young stock analyst, I explained to Phil Neches, chief scientist of Teradata, just why it was a really good business idea to drop T-QUEL for SQL. I doubt he was convinced quite on that day, more’s the pity.
| Categories: Database management systems, Ingres, Teradata | Leave a Comment |
No-fooling: A new blog-tagging meme
On April Fool’s Day, it is traditional to spread false stories that you hope will sound true. Last year, however, I decided to do the opposite – I posted some true stories that, at least for a moment, sounded implausible or false. This year I’m going to try to turn the idea into a kind of blog-tagging meme.*
*A blog-tagging meme is, in essence, an internet chain letter without the noxious elements.
Without further ado, the Rules of the No-Fooling Meme are:
Rule 1: Post on your blog 1 or more surprisingly true things about you,* plus their explanations. I’m starting off with 10, but it’s OK to be a lot less wordy than I’m being. 
I suggest the following format:
- A noteworthy capsule sentence. (Example: “I was not of mortal woman born.”)
- A perfectly reasonable explanation. (Example: “I was untimely ripped from my mother’s womb. In modern parlance, she had a C-section.”)
*If you want to relax the “about you” part, that’s fine too.
Rule 2: Link back to this post. That explains what you’re doing. 
Rule 3: Drop a link to your post into the comment thread. That will let people who check here know that you’ve contributed too.
Rule 4: Ping 1 or more other people encouraging them to join in the meme with posts of their own.
Hopefully, the end result of all this will be that we all know each other just a little bit better! And hopefully we’ll preserve some cool stories as well.
To kick it off, here are my entries. (Please pardon any implied boastfulness; a certain combustibility aside, I’ve lived a pretty fortunate life.)
I was physically evicted by hotel security from a DBMS vendor’s product announcement venue. It was the Plaza Hotel in NYC, at Cullinet’s IDMS/R announcement. Phil Cooper, then Cullinet’s marketing VP, blocked my entrance to the ballroom for the main event, and then called hotel security to have me removed from the premises.
A few years later, the same Phil Cooper stood me up for a breakfast meeting in his own house in Wellesley. When one’s around Phil Cooper, weird things just naturally happen. Read more
| Categories: Cullinet, Database management systems, Oracle | 7 Comments |
Software industry hijinks
The approach of April Fool’s Day has me thinking of software industry pranks and other hijinks. Most of what comes to mind is verbal jousting of various sorts that doesn’t really fit the theme. But there was one case in which ongoing business competition got pretty prankish: mainframe-era accounting software leaders MSA vs. McCormack & Dodge. Read more
| Categories: Application software, Fun stuff, MSA, McCormack & Dodge | 4 Comments |
Historical significance of TPC benchmarks
In case you missed it, I’ve had a couple of recent conversations about the TPC-H benchmark. Some people suggest that, while almost untethered from real-world computing, TPC-Hs inspire real world product improvements. Richard Gostanian even offered a specific example of same — Solaris-specific optimizations for the ParAccel Analytic Database.
That thrilling advance notwithstanding, I’m not aware of much practical significance to any TPC-H-related DBMS product development. But multiple people this week have reminded me this week the TPC-A and TPC-B played a much greater role spurring product development in the 1990s. And I indeed advised clients in those days that they’d better get their TPC results up to snuff, because they’d be at severe competitive disadvantage until they did.
It’s tough to be precise about examples, because few vendors will admit they developed important features just to boost their benchmark scores. But it wasn’t just TPCs — I recall marketing wars around specific features (row-level locking, nested subquery) or trade-press benchmarks (PC World?) as much as around actual TPC benchmarks. Indeed, Oracle had an internal policy called WAR, which stood for Win All Reviews; trade press benchmarks were just a subcase of that.
And then there’s Dave DeWitt’s take. Dave told me yesterday at SIGMOD that it’s unfortunate Jim Gray-inspired debit/credit TPCs won out over the Wisconsin benchmarks, because that led the industry down the path of focusing on OLTP at the expense of decision support/data warehousing. Whether or not the causality is as strict as Dave was suggesting, it’s hard to dispute that mainstream DBMS met or exceeded almost all users’ OTLP performance needs by early in his millenium. And it’s equally hard to dispute that those systems* performance on analytic workloads, as of last year, still needed a great deal of improvement.
*IBM’s DB2 perhaps excepted. And I say “last year” so as to duck the questions of whether Exadata finally solved Oracle’s problems and whether Madison will once Microsoft releases it.
| Categories: Database management systems, Oracle | 2 Comments |
WSJ article on Bill Gates’ family, and other stories
The Wall Street Journal offers an article on Bill Gates’ family, specifically his relationship with his parents. It rings true to me. I only met Bill’s parents once, at a black tie party at Ann Winblad’s house in 1986.
That’s the party where Bill yelled at me that Microsoft would beat Lotus because Lotus didn’t know how to develop software. It’s also the one where I got up to address the party-goers and started with words to the effect “There are two things you need to recall about Ann. First, she has a lot of confidence in the abilities of her friends. Second, she’s somewhat perverse.” But I digress …
Anyhow, my take on Bill’s parents at the time was that his mother was sweet, warm, helpful, etc., while his father was a somewhat uptight stereotypical white-shoe WASP. The article doesn’t contradict any of that, but suggests further dynamics that round out the picture, and which are quite consistent with the reporting all along of Bill Sr. as being quite the good guy.
As for the party: There was a major Impressionist art exhibit in San Francisco that year, so Ann decided to have a party in connection with it, cohosted by our mutual friend Rosann Stach. 18 couples, black tie, catered, valet parking, with minibuses to take us to the actual exhibit and back at some point. I was tasked to come up with “Impressionist music”, which I solved by calling up a college girlfriend who was an orchestra conductor, and is why Gabriel Faure’ wound up being very high on my list of favorite composers.
My new girlfriend and I also had dinner w/ Ann and Rosann the night before, when the seating chart was being worked out. (With many more friends in the SF area than back where I lived in NYC, I had the habit of taking a new girlfriend along on a business trip to meet my friends. Ann was particularly pleased in this case, as my backup choice of a party date would have been an ex-girlfriend of Bill’s …)
Ann decided that before dessert the men (Or was it the women? I forget now.) would all get up and go sit somewhere else, with their new companion to be indicated on the placecards. I had the bright idea to, instead of naming the companion, put a riddle about the companion’s identity, that one would either know or could surely answer w/ the help of the other guests. (Some spouses aside, the guests were generally people who knew a fair amount about each other — the ones I’ve named, plus Cristina Morgan, John Doerr, Jerry Kaplan, Will Hearst, and so on.) And thus it became my task to explain the challenge to the guests at the appropriate time … hence my opening remarks quoted above.
| Categories: Microsoft | 2 Comments |
A bit of DB2 history, per IBM
I meant to put up a longer post some months back, reproducing some of the 25th anniversary DB2 history IBM provided, courtesy of Jeff Jones and his team. Seems I didn’t get around to it. Maybe later.
Anyhow, I ran across the following concise info, from a January, 2003 web page posted by (who else?) Jeff Jones: Read more
| Categories: Database management systems, IBM | 3 Comments |
Database machines and data warehouse appliances – the early days
The idea of specialized hardware for running database management systems has been around for a long time. For example, in the late 1970s, UK national champion computer hardware maker ICL offered a “Content-Addressable Data Store” (or something like that), based on Cullinane’s CODASYL database management system IDMS. EDIT: See corrections in the comment thread. (My PaineWebber colleague Steve Smith had actually sold – or at least attempted to sell – that product, and provided useful support when Cullinane complained to my management about my DBMS market conclusions.) But for all practical purposes, the first two significant “database machine” vendors were Britton-Lee and Teradata. And since Britton-Lee eventually sold out to Teradata (after a brief name change to ShareBase), Teradata is entitled to whatever historical glory accrues from having innovated the database management appliance category.
| Categories: Cullinet, Database management systems, Ingres, Sybase, Teradata | 7 Comments |
Wikipedia on Cullinet and my comments on same
Wikipedia’s current article on Cullinet is long, detail-laden, and slanted. The difficulties are not of the sort to be fixed with my usual pinpoint Wikipedia edits. So I’ll just reproduce it here, commenting as I go. As for copyright — this particular post is as GPLed as it needs to be to comply with Wikipedia’s copyleft rules. All other rights remain reserved.
The company was originally started by John Cullinane and Larry English in 1968 as Cullinane Corporation. Their idea was to sell pre-packaged software to mainframe users, which was at that time a new concept in an era when enterprises only used internally developed applications or the software that came bundled with the hardware.
Actually, Applied Data Research got there first. Read more
| Categories: Application software, Companies and products, Computer Associates, Cullinet, Database management systems, Industry sectors | 3 Comments |
At least somebody remembers his history
I’m going through a ton of MySQL-related blog posts right now, for obvious reasons. I ran across one from last month in which MySQL’s senior execs said ridiculous things about industry history, such as Microsoft started as an OS company or Microsoft didn’t think much about its business model when it started out. Fortunately, the interviewer — Brier Dudley — knew better, and quickly sent them on a ferocious backpedal. Hats off to him!