On Wednesday 06 December 2006 10:32, you wrote: > Adrian von Bidder wrote: > > Yuck! > > Have a cup of tea please. I intend to help both debian and ingres by > packaging this beast, not start just-another-flamewar on which dbms has > the longest toes. I certainly didn't intend to start a flamewar, sorry if I came across a bit aggressive. I just tried to point out in what ways your proposed description is unsatisfactory to me. Ingres is certainly a piece of software worth having in Debian, and since the package description is usually the first thing people see, it is quite important that it gives enough of the "right kind" of information. > Ingres is arguably the oldest dbms in operation, Put that sentence in the description > and probably one of the > most mature ones at that. That perhaps not - maturity is always a matter of judgment. Are there any good comparisons? (Note that I do not doubt the maturity of Ingres!) > It's been in production since the 1960's and > was Michael Stonebrakers brainchild before he initiated postquel which > led to postgres. Put that in. > Ingres is a vastly scalable, Again: scalability is unclear how to measure, and all serious databases scale. > ansi SQL-92 compatible database server. Put that in. > It has a C2 security clearance Put that in, if your package actually stands up to the claim. Such clearance usually comes with specific versions, or even with specific versions deployed on specific platforms, so you'll have to be careful. > and has been in used in mission critical > deployments such as aerospace route-planning for Lufthansa for decades. (MS Windows is being used to drive US war ships, I'm told. Mission critical, too.) > It was bought by Relational Technologies, then by CA, and now spun off > into a GPL product maintained and supported by the Ingres Corporation. > They are currently stil struggling to embrace the FOSS strategy as part > of their corporate culture, so the FOSS community surrounding it is > still kind of meagre. I'd leave that out. > It can do large-scale clustering. dito > It can even cluster hybrid databases > such as oracle, mssql, sybase, etc in a single cluster. It needs a > proprietary extension to do so though. Now *that's* worth mentioning, even with the proprietary extension disclaimer. > It can do multi-master replication using a two-phase commit setup to > ensure replication of transactions to all nodes. 2PC is becoming standard, but I'd still mention it since not all db products have it. > It can do updates on view of view of view... Another feature I think is worth mentioning, some other dbs don't even have simple updateable views. > It can do table based, column based, and value based partitioning. dito. > Just some of the things that caught my attention, and by no means a > definitive list. Obviously you'll not be able to put the whole feature catalog in the descripton, even though it's called "long" description... :-) Still, just to make my point: with these comments, I get the information that * Ingres is an old project, the parent of Postgresql * it does SQL92 * can, with some extension, cluster heterogenous db (it might not be such a godd idea to put in the description, on second thought. README.Debian perhaps.) * supports distributed environments through 2PC * has state of the art features such as partitioning and updateable views. Most of this is interesting to me when I pick a database system, whereas phrases like "scaleable", "use in middion critical systems" etc. are just noise because there is just no way to tell what they mean, exactly. I hope you see what I mean. Friendly greetings -- vbi -- Could this mail be a fake? (Answer: No! - http://fortytwo.ch/gpg/intro)
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