[Openroad-users] FW: Ingres Engineering Summit

[Bodo Bergmann]

Here is a summary about what was going on re OpenROAD at the summit.

Presentations:

OpenROAD Community Process - David Tondreau

David gave a presentation about how OpenROAD should work in the Open Source space,
including topics like building the community, facilitating community contributions
and opening up the engineering process.
He also explained our plan to have a community codeline (Empire) which is separate from the commercial in
in order to provide a better environment to support contributions, etc. (similar to the Fedora - RedHat model) 
BTW: The DBMS guys now plan to follow the same model, so we are kind of forerunner.
See the OpenROAD community pages (http://community.ingres.com/wiki/Ingres_OpenROAD_Home) for more information.

OpenROAD Architecture Directions - Durwin Wright

Durwin talket about what has happened since last year (i.e. Unicode support),
provided ideas about the future of the OpenROAD server, i.e. to remove the DCOM dependency.
His presentation is available here: http://community.ingres.com/w/files/a/a7/OpenROADArchitecturalDirecttions.pdf
	
Source Control with OpenROAD - Bodo Bergmann

My presentation started from listing some limitations of the OpenROAD Repository and the current export file format
and the idea that a common Software Configuration Management (SCM) system, e.g. Subversion,
combined with a new XML-based export file format could provide the functionality required in many development groups.
I then talked about the status of implementing some required features to support this (Generic XML support classes & XML Export),
and some ideas what new options they offer for OpenROAD development.
BTW: We will soon make the functional specs and design documents for the new XML features available to the community.

Transforge - Kim Ginnerup(Bording Data) & John Mahony

This was a great joint presentation between a partner and a member of the OR Development team,
that demonstrated the experiences and benefits of a Development partnership - in this case for the
Transforge (ABF->OpenROAD conversion) solution.
The result was a win-win situation for both sides:
The partner gets what he wants (the ultimate, cost-effective transformation of his legacy applications)
and Ingres improved its solution set (Transforge) to get better product and service quality.
It had the biggest "Wow" effect when Kim showed his "Before" (ABF) and "After" (OpenROAD/Web) screens.

Ingres Alchemy - Neil Warnock, Luminary

This session was about experiences with Luminary's service offering "Ingres Alchemy"
to future-proof/modernize/beautify applications.
It was not OpenROAD-centric, but I mention it, as Luminary uses a lot of OpenROAD technology within their "Alchemy" techniques,
e.g. to get from a pure client-server application to a multi-tiered SOA-enabled architecture.
Neil also told great success stories and had nice before/after screenshots available.

Development Sprint (hands-on sessions):

These activities were designed to meld the brains of the Ingres OpenROAD Development team
with those of community developers in a speed-oriented activity designed to quickly add new features to OpenROAD. 
Kim Ginnerup of Bording Data A/S and the OpenROAD Development team won this year's
Ingres Open Engineering Development Sprint Contest in Punta Cana by implementing a new HashObject system class.
Read more about it on Kim's OpenROAD community user page: http://community.ingres.com/wiki/User:Kgi%40%2A%2A%2A


Best regards,
Bodo.

Bodo Bergmann
Senior Software Engineer
OpenROAD Worldwide Development
Ingres Corp.

-----Original Message-----
From: openroad-users-bounces at peerlessit.com [mailto:openroad-users-bounces at peerlessit.com] On Behalf Of Paul White
Sent: Thursday, May 01, 2008 12:52 AM
To: International OpenROAD Users
Subject: [Openroad-users] FW: Ingres Engineering Summit

Here's a great article about the Engineering Summit.
Can someone provide an update on the OpenROAD activities?
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Roy Hann
Sent: Wednesday, 30 April 2008 2:51 AM
To: info-ingres at kettleriverconsulting.com
Subject: [Info-Ingres] Ingres Engineering Summit

Nobody has yet posted any report of the Ingres Engineering Summit anywhere, so I thought I'd report a few bits and pieces that captured my attention.

First of all, it was an open event, as befits an open source company. 
Anyone was welcome to attend and a great many partners (and others) did.  I don't know the total headcount but considering it was a moderately expensive week and a long time out of the office, it was very well attended.  I'd guess there were well over 100 people there.

The amount of openness demonstrated was impressive.  It wasn't just about exposing the code, it was also about exposing the thinking, the working practices, the people, and--yes--the tensions.  With the exception of a one-hour slot that was employees-only, everything was out in the open. 
Anyone who didn't attend has missed out on a lot.  Plan to attend next year.

Just running through the agenda from top to bottom, and focussing just on Ingres rather than OpenROAD, here are some highlights:

Andrew Ross did a one hour presentation that covered a lot of ground on the general theme of "community development", and more precisely, the barriers to community development and what has to change to make it easier/possible. 
As we all know, there was a lot standing in our way, and there is a long way to go still.  However the need for a properly open process was as taken as given.  As well as reporting a lot of progress with things like http://code.ingres.com (Subversion code repository), http://lxr.ingres.com (code cross-referencer), and http://bugs.ingres.com (bug tracking), Andrew also outlined a number of as-yet unresolved problems. I think I'll leave it to Andrew to elaborate on those, but the big one (IMO) is the communication channels.  Mike Sale, Mike Leo and I have been discussing this too.  One thing we agree on is that the current phpBB-based Ingres forums are an embarrassment and have to go (real soon if I have my way).  Mike Leo's suggestion of using vBulletin turns out to be top of the list at Ingres too, so that could happen fairly quickly.  There are several benefits to vBulletin but the big one is that it will allow us to have a single community delivered via web pages, e-mail, or NNTP, so that we can accommodate everyone's way of working.  IRC will of course remain separate.

Another big item from Andrew's presentation is that there are actually two fairly successful virtual development systems about ready for delivery.  We should be able to get our hands on these within a week or so.

I won't dwell on the rest of the presentations in such detail.  You can infer the significance of these topics appearing on the agenda as well as I can.

We had a number of demos of things like Ingres Café and some OpenGIS software.  There was a presentation from Gordon Thorpe on the formidable challenge of re-architecting GCA.  Hugh Darwen spoke about Project D (an implementation of Tutorial D on top of Ingres) and earned himself the second prize for Best Presentation.  We had two presentations on column stores, one of which went on to win the first prize Best Presentation (Marcin Zukowski on Monet/x100).  Karl spoke fluently about something or other for an hour 
and many of us marvelled.   Mike Touloumtzis led a discussion about how to 
implement column encryption; nothing was decided but a lot of ground was explored.  Steve Ball and Alison Stillway led another discussion on how to implement MVCC and which model of MVCC to adopt; nothing was decided except that a design document will be drafted for public comment.  (To my mind this may be the most immediately and widely useful enhancement that popped up on 
the new-features radar.)   Emma McGrattan picked up where Andrew Ross left 
off.  The big thing in her presentation was the carefully expressed and several-times repeated instruction that Ingres Corp requires all its personnel to devote 10% of their time to community projects (i.e. 1/2 day 
per week).  That is a lot of effort folk!   After Emma, Kai-Uwe Sattler 
talked about some research into making Ingres more autonomous and self-tuning (including the ability to recommend secondary indices and statistics).  There were two presentations on two different replicators from 
partner companies.   Roger Whitcomb told us about the work he's been doing 
on Ingres Management Tools, which was really good stuff.  (I was present at the meeting where VDBA was first unveiled back circa 1995 and it was greeted with horror and revulsion then, and nothing has changed.  Roger's work is definitely going in the right direction this time.)  After this I stepped out of server-land and saw Daryl Monge discussing Ruby on Rails.  For some reason every head in the room turned to look at me when he reminded us that RoR requires every table to have a synthetic integer key.  Evidently everyone understands this is wicked and wrong and that they should feel guilty about it, but equally evidently people are just going to go on doing it anyway.  That was enough for me, so I retreated back to server-land again after that.

So there you are.  I saw fewer than half the presentations, so perhaps someone else will comment on the others.

Finally , I am hoping to get at least a couple of these repeated at the IUA conference on June 17 in London.  Please let me know if there is anything above that particularly takes your fancy and I will see what I can do.

Roy 



________________________________________________________________
OpenROAD-Users mailing list

You can maintain your subscription here:
http://www.peerlessit.com/mailman/listinfo/openroad-users

To unsubscribe click on this link
mailto:openroad-users-unsubscribe at peerlessit.com&subject=unsubscribe

To subscribe click on this link
mailto:openroad-users-subscribe at peerlessit.com&subject=subscribe