Ingres claims massive database performance boost

Ingres is set to offer its users more than a 100-fold increase in database performance in a move that it said would shake up the database market.

The company has been working with Dutch database research institute CWI and Intel on a project called VectorWise whose aim, said Ingres CEO Roger Burkhardt, was to bring Moore's Law to business applications and speed up processing dramatically.

VectorWise has been about developing a set of algorithms that ensure that the chip works as fast as it should do, said Burkhardt."Although chip speeds have got faster, it doesn't mean that applications have become faster," he said. "We've written a complete set of algorithms to improve that speed."

Burkhardt claimed some astonishing leaps in performance. "Our tests show that we can improveperformance by 10-fold for complex queries and by up to 120-fold for simple ones," he said.

The use of VectorWise technology will mean a complete transformation of the way that some companies will do business said Burkhardt. "It's early days yet and we haven't spoken to many customers yet but those we have mentioned it too are very excited. He gave two examples where he thought customers could benefit. "Financial services organisations have to deal with complex transactions involving a number of different areas - currency rates, interest rates, trading prices etc - and they need everything at top speeds where fractions of seconds can matter. We demonstrated VectorWise on one query that took a couple of minutes on a SQL Server and it took about two seconds using VectorWise."

Burkhardt also said that telcos were very interested in looking at the technology to solve some of the issues that they had to deal with reconciling customer accounts and payments with usage records.

But, said Burkhardt, there will be a great many customers interested in this. "We're basically providing the ability for something that had to be run on a server to be run a laptop," he said.

Ingres is looking for partners to work with it on developing applications to run on VectorWise. "We're announcing it early," said Burkhardt, "so we can attract some ISVs to come and work with us." The company hasn't yet got around to discussing pricing for VectorWise but, said Burkhardt, it won't be an expensive upgrade for Ingres users.

Nor is he worried about other vendors catching up with Ingres. VectorWise has been a two-year project, with some key input from research organisation CWI. CWi's chief-scientist Peter Boncz has been a key driver in the process said Burkhardt. "Peter Boncz, has just been awarded a medal for the best database paper in the last 10 years, that level of expertise has been invaluable." It just won't be possible for other vendors to call on that, he added.

"Besides, he said, for Oracle to introduce something like this would involve them completely rewriting their database and they're not going to do that," he said.