The relational database market is forecast to be worth $8,000m a year by 1992, and Relational Technology Inc intends to increase its present claimed 26% worldwide market share with last week’s launch of version 6 of its Ingres database in the UK – under the auspicies of what the company has termed the Cooperative Systems […]
The relational database market is forecast to be worth $8,000m a year by 1992, and Relational Technology Inc intends to increase its present claimed 26% worldwide market share with last week’s launch of version 6 of its Ingres database in the UK – under the auspicies of what the company has termed the Cooperative Systems Architecture environment (CI No 1,123). According to Marty Sprizen, vice-president of engineering, over 90% of Ingres was rewritten for the project, costing $20m, and representing – the largest development effort Relational Technology has ever made. It includes a new multi-server architecture – incorporating parallel processing capability – and the ability to handle multiple enquiries and transactions from any number simultaneous users, anywhere within the system. Ingres 6 is claimed to have greater data management performance – twice that of Ingres 5 via an artificial intelligence-based query optimiser, new sorting facilities and a group commit feature. SQL compliance with the ANSI standard and IBM’s DB2 is built in, as are new menus, pop up windows, interfaces and tools. Existing users can upgrade to Ingres 6 free of charge – versions for DEC VAX and Sun Microsystems machines are available now, others will to follow over the course of this year. All these new features have been specifically designed to enable Ingres to operate within a hetrogeneous hardware and software environment, providing both application and location transparency. Cooperative Systems Architecture is Relational’s answer to emerging customer demands for a system to look, feel and act like one system, regardless of its components. Ingres 6 can be networked through Unix, VMS, IBM MVS and VM operating systems, IMS, DB2, SQL/DS, RDB and other Ingres databases, as well as supporting X Window System, Presentation Manager, the Open Software Foundation’s Motif and AT&T’s Open Look user interfaces – in any combination – through a plethora of gateways and network protocols developed by the Alameda, California-based company over the last two years. One Ingres interface is presented throughout the system, and programs written using Ingres tools can be stored in and accessed from any part of the system, not just the local operating system. Ingres 6 supersedes both Ingres/Net and Ingres/Star and customers can buy the various bits and pieces for their individual systems which fit on top Ingres 6 – from June of this year. Ingres 6 was launched on December 19 last year in the US, but Cooperative Systems Architecture is not due for announcement on the other side of the Atlantic until April. Other releases in the pipeline include the programming tools Relational Technology engineers used to develop the Cooperative Systems Architecture – claimed to reduce 100,000 lines of code to just 1,500, and new workstation applications.
