Ingres Corporation, an open source database management company, has begun shipping a high-performance analytics engine intended to speed up the time it takes for queries. The solution, Ingres VectorWise for Linux, is built on Ingres' VectorWise technology, and Ingres claims seeing performance gains of 10x to 70x over existing database and analytic servers while running sophisticated analytics on large to truly massive data sets.
VectorWise is intended to serve as a supporting tool to leading BI solutions, including Cognos, Business Objects, and SAS, Emma McGrattan, senior vice president of engineering for Ingres, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "VectorWise is complementary to these solutions and enables users of these products to analyze data in a fraction of the time that it would take with existing database technologies."
VectorWise uses a new design to unlock the vastly superior capabilities of modern commodity hardware. These capabilities are the result of years of multi-billion dollar chip technology investments which can only be exploited by software designed for this era. "Rather than an analytic application, Ingres VectorWise is an analytic database," McGrattan explains. "VectorWise, as the name implies, leverages vector processing to maximize performance and throughput on the latest CPUs. It provides the performance benefits that one would expect from column-based storage solutions, but unlike many of its competitors, it is updateable."
As is the case with its database, Ingres is offering Vectorwise as an open source solution. "Ingres Vectorwise and has shared source code with a community of database scientists who are extending the technology," says McGrattan. "Ingres is working on a broader source code distribution via a Community Edition, plans for which will be released later this year. In the meantime a free download of Ingres VectorWise compiled for Linux will be available for developers to build applications on and to enable easy evaluation of the technology."
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