Do you want to see it again?

[rhann]

I've been putting the alpha-release of Ingres VectorWise through its paces for the last few weeks.

According to the unofficial information that I am seeing popping up on some blogs, VectorWise will be getting limited beta-release very soon, so you'll soon have a chance to try it for yourself. I thought it might be useful to share some of my experiences with it here to give you an idea what to expect from it.

The first thing to say about it is obvious; it it blindingly fast. I'll have lots to say about that later but for now I'll just mention that the smallest improvement in performance that I have seen, compared with classic Ingres, is a factor of 12 times faster.

Amusingly, this has already been a problem when demonstrating VectorWise. At last year's UK IUA conference Bill Maimone showed an early prototype running on his laptop, querying a 180 million row table, and it was so fast that I am pretty sure most of the audience didn't realize he was running a query before it was over. Jim Callaghan compared it with the old joke about the gun-slinger with the fastest draw in Texas. "Do you want to see it again?"

The second thing that you quicky discover is that the databases are very compact compared with classic Ingres. You can store a lot more data in the same space. In fact you can store so much more that some of my current tests can't be compared with the results from classic Ingres because I simply don't have the disk space to create a billion (that's billion, with a "B" for bravo) row table in a classic Ingres database.

I said above that the first thing you'll notice is how fast VectorWise is. That is literally true. Long-time Ingres users won't notice it being installed. It just happens. The first release I got was built on Ingres 9.4 and the install process was a wee bit ragged, but heck, it was the first alpha-release, and I did make it difficult by installing it as a peer installation with non-standard locations. The latest release I have, which is built on Ingres 10, installs smoothly with no fuss at all. If you didn't know it had VectorWise inside it, you would never know it was anything different.

More later on the blog I've started.

[bill.maimone]

Stay tuned, with some luck we should have a beta out this week, including some enhancements for VectorWise and numerous bug fixes. I'm working also on a clearer statement for this, but we'll be relaxing access somewhat as we've become more comfortable with the stability and the ability of people to self-select sensible applications for analytics. And we'll look to push much of the current email traffic into the forums, so the active TPP sites can cross-pollinate. Not surprisingly a lot of you have similar observations and suggestions for improvements.