http://community.ingres.com/forum/blogs/whama01/ en Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:00:11 GMT vBulletin 60 http://community.ingres.com/forum/ingres4/misc/rss.jpg http://community.ingres.com/forum/blogs/whama01/ http://community.ingres.com/forum/blogs/whama01/25-i-felt-hat-might-time-reconsider-my-options.html Sat, 31 Oct 2009 10:03:10 GMT This morning, whilst waiting for the sun to rise before heading out on two wheels, I was presented with a dilemma. A colleague had posted a message... This morning, whilst waiting for the sun to rise before heading out on two wheels, I was presented with a dilemma. A colleague had posted a message on Facebook reporting that he was upgrading his home PC to “Karmic Koala”. Remembering that Thomas was an Ubuntu advocate, I presumed he was referring to a new version of his preferred operating system.

For me, my trusty 17in widescreen Toshiba Satellite laptop brick has happily lived for a number of years under the creased crown and pinched-in-the-front world of Fedora. It is currently under the reign of “Leonidas” (11), having previously visited “Cambridge” (10) and prior to that drowned in “Moonshine” (7).

This then got me thinking. How much are we guided by the name of something when making a selection? Whether it is Lamborghini, Testarossa, Veyron or Volga as your choice of car, or True Blue, Tangerine Orange, Plum Purple, Flamingo Pink or Mould Green as the colour of your new Dell Inspiron.

I cannot quite recall why I originally selected Fedora, but have remained faithful for many years. However, with the thought of the Feisty Fawn, Intrepid Ibex, Karmic Koala and Lucid Lynx over in the Ubuntu camp, who knows I might be tempted to dip a toe in the water.

Not that I am guided just on names, otherwise I might have been tempted for SuSE, with her curvaceous name and size 10 figure (just don’t tell the wife!). But then, when I found that her real name was Software und System-Entwicklung, the appeal seemed to disappear.

What do you mean I should not just be guided on name? Of course other things matter; features, fit for purpose, future of the market, flexibility for change and funds (i.e. can I afford it), but putting these to one side just for a moment, I do wonder how much a name can guide ones choice.

Then, once I have selected my preferred Operating System, time to choose an RDBMS. There are so many to choose from. Each has pros and cons. Their names are all so enticing, I must admit to having great difficulty in selecting one. Should I choose, OpenIngres, Ingres R3, Ingres II, Advantage Ingres Enterprise Relational Database or Ingres 2006. After much debate, I have decided on Ingres. After all, there is no other choice.

Mark Whalley
October 2009 ]]> whama01 4890 http://community.ingres.com/forum/blogs/whama01/25-i-felt-hat-might-time-reconsider-my-options.html http://community.ingres.com/forum/blogs/whama01/15-lost-translation.html Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:58:50 GMT Earlier this year we completed a major piece of work on a project to migrate one of our clients’ Windows Ingres (http://www.ingres.com/) 2.6... Earlier this year we completed a major piece of work on a project to migrate one of our clients’ Windows [url=http://www.ingres.com/]Ingres[/url] 2.6 databases to [url=http://www.ingres.com/about/press/08-1118-database.php]Ingres 9.2[/url] on [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux]Linux[/url]. So what’s so special about that I hear you ask? Well, in addition to implementing the now well rehearsed migration path between differing hardware platforms, operating systems and versions of Ingres, this particular project presented us with a number of unique challenges.

To start off with, we were faced with the hurdle of a language barrier – the client is primarily based in [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy]Italy[/url], but has offices in other countries, including [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France]France[/url] and [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland]Poland[/url]. Other than my mother tongue of English, je parle français (pas très bien), a little German and some [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobol]COBOL[/url], but not a word of Polish!


[img]http://www.auvergneitc.com/ingres/ltp/road_sign.jpg[/img]

Fortunately, our client could speak a little bit of English, which together with dictionaries, [url=http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_txt]Yahoo’s Babel Fish[/url] and various hand gestures; we generally managed to hold relatively comprehendible conversations.

Rather than install Ingres on a Linux server provided by the client, our next challenge was to migrate them to [url=http://www.ingres.com/products/icebreaker.php]Icebreaker[/url] (our enterprise-class database with a fully integrated operating system). This would be installed on a bare-metal server – a first for me.

As if the above was not going to be demanding enough, for good measure, the icing on the cake was to enable the client to move from an [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859-1]ISO88591[/url] environment to [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utf8]UTF8[/url] – a first for all of us!

Not only would we have to install and configure Icebreaker and [url=http://www.ingres.com/products/openroad.php]OpenROAD[/url], we also had to migrate over 20 databases – some populated with data from an ISO88591 environment containing Western European characters, others with a Polish character set. On top of this there were literally hundreds of [url=http://www.ingres.com/services/course-IRW.php]Report Writer[/url] files and probably the most daunting, the translation of 60 OpenROAD applications to UTF8.

However, prior to migrating to UTF8, we first had to go live on an ISO88591 Icebreaker platform. Of course, this meant that we had to perform two migrations of all the databases, applications etc. Ah well, it was good practice.

The move from ISO88591 to UTF8 however is not as straightforward as may first seem. If those carefully crafted Polish characters, that to the rest of the Western World look somewhat strange are to appear as the same Polish characters in the UTF8 environment, then a carefully prescribed route must be adhered to. This would require various Ingres installations to be prepared (ISO88591, [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iso8859_2]ISO88592[/url] and UTF8), [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Machine]Virtual Machines[/url] coming out of our ears, [url=http://docs.ingres.com/]vnodes[/url] to connect the current Linux Icebreaker production databases to Windows environments, scripts to create and populate nchar and nvarchar UTF16 columns, scripts to expand the length of char and varchar columns to accommodate the 2, 3 and 4-byte UTF8 representations of characters, data to be copied out sometimes in ASCII, other times in binary and much much more. All this whilst switching Windows environments from where the migration had to be driven from ‘English’ to ‘Polish’ and back again.

One false move and several hours later Jeż Stanisław will look like Je¿ Stanis³aw or Jeż StanisÅ‚aw and we would have to start again. To reduce the risk of human error whilst testing and then performing the final migrations, as much of the process was scripted. Unfortunately it was not practical at this time to make the process a totally automated one – maybe something for a future project.

Q1. Was the project a success?
A1. A resounding one – the client now has a fully operational UTF8 environment and can continue their own growth plans into emerging markets around the world.

Q2. Would we do it again?
A2. Not without first enrolling on a course in Italian!

As for the road sign (above), to those not familiar with the [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_language]Welsh language[/url], it may appear perfectly in order. That is until someone who can speak Welsh (a very rare bread indeed) pointed out that the Welsh translation reads “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated”!


Mark Whalley ]]> whama01 4890 http://community.ingres.com/forum/blogs/whama01/15-lost-translation.html http://community.ingres.com/forum/blogs/whama01/14-whata-s-name.html Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:23:07 GMT I suspect like many, I make use of Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) to bring to my attention new catalogue entries of matching search... I suspect like many, I make use of [url=http://www.google.com/alerts]Google Alerts[/url] to bring to my attention new catalogue entries of matching search criteria. Although I don’t want to be inundated with emails, I have a small selection of carefully chosen words and phrases, of which our beloved [url=http://www.ingres.com/]Ingres[/url] is naturally one.

My daily dose of new entries matching ‘Ingres’ occasionally comes up with a few pleasant findings that I had not already found or heard of elsewhere. Whether they are reports of Ingres in the [url=http://www.ingres.com/about/press-and-news.php]press[/url] (all good news of course!), Ingres [url=http://www.ingres.com/about/events.php]presentations[/url] at Open Source events or messages on [url=http://community.ingres.com/]Community Forums[/url], they are almost always interesting and informative, and often form topics for further discussion elsewhere.

Of course, included in these daily digests is the occasional smattering of references to the French Neoclassical painter [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Auguste_Dominique_Ingres]Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres[/url]. Born in [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France]France[/url] in [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1780]1780[/url], Ingres was indeed a talented artist with some of his more famous works on display in the [url=http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/home.html]Louvre, Musée d’Orsay[/url] and [url=http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/default.htm]National Gallery of Arts[/url].

[img]http://www.auvergneitc.com/ingres/ltp/ingres_ja.jpg[/img]

I have known about Ingres (the artist) for many years (almost as many as I have worked with Ingres – the RDBMS!).

I remember many years ago conducting a round of interviews for an Ingres Developer/Tester whilst working for the [url=http://www.swansea.ac.uk/]University of Wales, Swansea[/url]. Wanting to see how observant the prospective candidates were, I borrowed a book from the University library entitled something like ‘Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch’ which I left quite prominently on my desk. Of the several candidates we interviewed, only one used the customary ‘Do you have any questions to ask us?’ section of the interview to ask about the book.

It goes without saying, the inclusion of a second ‘s’ when some people spell Ingres gets frowned upon whenever I see it in reference to our treasured RDBMS. Some may blame it on Mr Gates’ss spell checker (which reminds me of a poem I once read starting with “Eye halve a spelling chequer, It came with my pea sea...”, but that will have to wait for another posting). For me, the misspelling of Ingres (when being used to refer to The Leading Enterprise Open Source Database) just goes to show that the author is either very careless about checking their spelling or knows nothing about Ingres.

Of the latter, I have on a number of occasions used this to my advantage when dissecting auditors reports, security check reports and the like where clearly the authors come from an Orakle background and don’t understand why Ingres does not have tablespaces, triggers or instances. Oh damn, we appear to have already given in to rules and installations.


In follow-up postings to ‘What’s in a name’, I will bring you ‘A sign of the times – where drivers are advised to take the next exit for The Oracle’, ‘I have this sinking feeling – an Ingress of water’, ‘Lost in translation – it’s all Polish, Italian, Welsh and UTF8’ and ‘What a strange name for a product – how to get the Advantage in 2006’.

Oh, and by the way, the young lady who asked about the Portraits by Ingres got the job!

Mark Whalley ]]> whama01 4890 http://community.ingres.com/forum/blogs/whama01/14-whata-s-name.html http://community.ingres.com/forum/blogs/whama01/11-l-t-p.html Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:20:04 GMT Oh no, not another TLA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_letter_acronym) I hear you cry! After promising myself and a few others that it was... Oh no, not another [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_letter_acronym]TLA[/url] I hear you cry!

After promising myself and a few others that it was time to venture into the world of blogging, I thought it only right and proper to choose a title which would characterize the general theme of the content of my blog.

This presented the first dilemma. I have absolutely no idea what the [i]general theme[/i] is going to turn out to be. Of course, living in [url=http://community.ingres.com/forum/blogs/]/community.ingres.com/forum/blogs/[/url] would suppose that [url=http://www.ingres.com/]Ingres[/url] is going to feature somewhere in there. As a Senior Consultant for Ingres’ [url=http://www.ingres.com/services/premium-services.php]Operational Services[/url] group, our day-to-day activities are also likely to offer considerable subject matter. Being well into my 3rd decade working in the field of IT (the last two of which I have spent predominantly working with Ingres) should surely provide enough material to trigger a few topics for discussion.

But then there are a whole raft of other topics; some of them directly related to Ingres, others not. These include a number of Community Project ideas I have rattling around my head waiting to emerge in front of an unsuspecting public. The list is endless, the subject matter varied and none of it falls neatly into a general theme.

So, having debated and ruled out the likes of [i]A Day in the Life of a DBA[/i] (what, just one day?), [i]Mark Whalley, Senior Consultant[/i] (that just made me feel older than I like to think I am) and [i]From Prostitute to Permie[/i] (prior to joining [url=http://www.ingre.com]Ingres[/url] I was an independent contractor for 10 years!), I decided to pick a title which to many may seem somewhat obscure.

In the end, the title I chose has a meaning which I am sure will form the basis of a number of blog topics over the coming months and years. For those who already know me, I am sure an association to some of my voluntary, community and personal activities will ring a bell. To others, it will mean absolutely nothing!

[center][size=+2][i]Listing to Port aka LTP[/i][/size][/center]

As will hopefully become apparent in future blogs, this title has some quite specific personal associations. It does however also have a number of links to the aforementioned – all of which will become clear in time.

[img]http://www.auvergneitc.com/ingres/ltp/covington_maw.jpg[/img]
However, before finalising on the title, I just wanted to make sure its acronym didn’t carry any potential undesirable alternative names. As a result, I quickly ruled out the likes of [i]Centre for Retired Abf Programmers[/i]!

A quick Google search for LTP as an acronym revealed nothing too frightening. And indeed highlighted some others which were quite apt; [i]Long Term Prediction[/i], [i]Learning to Play[/i], [i]Logical Thought Process[/i], [i]Linux Test Project[/i] and [i]Likes to Party[/i].

So that’s it. LTP has been born.


Mark Whalley ]]> whama01 4890 http://community.ingres.com/forum/blogs/whama01/11-l-t-p.html