Ingres, a vendor of open source databases, is 'planning to move its VectorWise database performance technology to a beta release phase during the next month,' according to Ingres President/CEO Roger Burkhardt.

 

In a recent interview with InfoWorld, Burkhardt said VectorWise 'has achieved a 10- to 100-times performance improvement for data-intensive workloads such as data warehouse operations,' calling it 'a fundamental breakthrough in database engineering.'

 

Last August ,DBMS2 wrote that VectorWise is due to be introduced in 2010 – VectorWise's 'Peter Boncz said that to me more clearly than I’ve seen in other coverage.'

 

According to Burkhardt the company has been working with Intel (News - Alert) and VectorWise, which was spun out of Dutch research institute CWI, on the technology, which has been available in an alpha code program since last month and was announced in July of last year, InfoWorld reported, adding that general availability is scheduled for the second quarter of this year.

 

Back in July, industry observer Peter Judge reported that Ingres announced 'a plan to use vector-processing to unlock the potential of Moore’s Law in standard chips, and offer radically cheaper data analysis.'

 

While processors have been dramatically increasing in power, Judge wrote, 'conventional databases have not been able to take advantage of their ability to handle multiple instructions at the same time. Ingres has rewritten its kernel to provide a module that will 'vectorise' any queries so analysis of databases with millions of rows can take place in less than a second' on cheap hardware.

 

“Moore’s law talks about doubling processor capacity every couple of years,” Ketan Karia, vice president of marketing at Ingres, said to Judge at the time. “We’ve never seen that translate to performance increases in business software -- in fact we’ve seen the opposite.”

 

In fact, Judge wrote, 'the new module will deliver an immediate 10 times performance boost for business applications and will continue to deliver even faster speeds as processer hardware improves.'