25 facts about Ingres, give or take a couple
Emma McGrattan of Ingres offers a “25 facts” post about Ingres. 24 really are about Ingres. Some are interesting (who knew Ingres still used a lot of Quel?). Some are if anything understated — e.g., there are lots of current CEOs who are Ingres alums (Dave Kellogg and Dennis Moore jump to mind). Only one is a real eyebrow-raiser.
Point 23 says “The average tenure of an Ingres Engineer is 15+ years.” On the other hand, Point 3 says “The longest serving member of Ingres staff is John Smedley who has been with us since June of 1987.” And most of Ingres’ technical staff left after Ingres was acquired by CA, which occurred a few months shy of 15 years ago. Reconciling all that is challenging.
Actually, I was dubious about a second claim too, namely that Ingres/Star was the first distributed DBMS; I thought that the distributed version of Tandem NonStop SQL actually predated it by a few years. But a somewhat contemporaneous article with a number of distributed DBMS dates shows my memory was wrong on that score.
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3 Responses to “25 facts about Ingres, give or take a couple”
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Its good that you called me up on that one. CA augmented the engineering team right after the acquisition with a number of very talented and experienced folks from the IDMS and DATACOM development teams. They’re approaching their 15 year anniversary in Ingres this summer and the fact that there are in fact quite a few of us who pre-date the ASK Group acquisition by CA which pushes us just over the 15 year mark. In hindsight I probably should have left it at 15 years.
Hi Emma!
So you’re saying that almost nobody has been added to the engineering team in the intervening 14+ years? 🙂
I presume then you’re talking about kernel engineering or something rather than every last UI designer or QA type.
By the way, upon further reflection your #19 is also dubious. Datacom/DB seemed to have pretty real distributed DBMS capabilities before the relational products ever did. Perhaps other inverted-list products such as ADABAS and/or Model 204 did as well.
Yes, I meant the DBMS core engineering team which has had a few additions in the intervening years, but most of the staff augmentation has been for functionality around the DBMS rather than the DBMS kernel itself.
I’ll add the word “relational” to #19 to clear this point up.
Cheers
Emma