Whoever said the finish line is the end of the race clearly has never participated in an Ingres Code Sprint. Ingres, the leading provider of open source database management software and pioneer of the New Economics of IT, hosted the Ingres Code Sprint, a two-day event held last week in advance of the UK Ingres Users Association Annual Conference in London. Ingres Code Sprint brought together customers, partners, and Ingres engineers to design, code, and create new features. As a result of the two-day code-fest, compelling new features will now be added to the Ingres product line.

“We achieved great results this year and the diversity of companies and developers made the London event a tremendous success,” said Emma McGrattan, senior vice president of engineering, Ingres, and organizer of the Ingres Code Sprint. “It’s a testament to the open source community when we can get together and make improvements on features and programs that are being used every day, by the people who depend on them.”

Ingres set up build environments using pre-configured virtual machines that could be run on a laptop or in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Teams, including representatives from EDS, AAH Pharmaceuticals, Bording Data and Oxford University, experimented with coding and debugging. Experienced Ingres engineers were on hand to provide mentoring and assistance.

“I’ve made a number of contributions to Ingres since attending last year’s code sprint, and was very excited to work side-by-side with Ingres engineers again this year. The knowledge I’ve gained has been instrumental in my work at Oxford University,” said Martin Bowes, database administrator, Oxford University, and open source coordinator for the UK Ingres Users Association. “The features that have come out of this year’s event, such as the ability to call out to the operating system from the SQL terminal monitor and the new soundex routine, illustrate what can be done when the community shares ideas.”

Some of the larger scale features that were implemented during Ingres Code Sprint include:

Drupal on Ingres – Using an Amazon EC2 environment a pre-configured Amazon Machine Image was created that combines Ingres and Drupal in a ready-to-run configuration.

Compressed Backups – An option was added to the Ingres backup utility that compresses the backup set resulting in significant savings in large database environments.

Logging Database activity:

Enforced logging of all database activity – A list of databases for which transaction logging cannot be disabled can now be specified.

Disable logging when copying or unloading a database – To speed up unloading or copying databases, Ingres now provides the ability to not log activity while these actions are in progress.

Command History Recall – The Ingres SQL utility for Linux and UNIX now provides a command history that enables the user to recall and replay a list of previous commands.

Advanced Soundex Routine – Ingres now offers a new soundex routine based on the Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex algorithm, which provides for a far more reliable and accurate encoding of data.

Ingres Code Sprint was attended by community members from the UK, US, Canada, and Denmark. The next Ingres Code Sprint in the UK is already scheduled for June 2010.

About Ingres Corporation

Ingres is the leading open source database management company. We are the world’s second largest open source company and the pioneer of the New Economics of IT, providing open source solutions at dramatically reduced cost than proprietary software vendors. As a leader in The New Economics of IT, Ingres delivers low cost and accelerated innovation to more than 10,000 customers worldwide.

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