Ingres VectorWise Project Achieves More Than 10x Performance Gains

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — July 29, 2009 – Ingres Corporation, the leading open source database management company and pioneer of the New Economics of IT, today announced the Ingres VectorWise project, a collaboration between Ingres, VectorWise, a spin out from the leading database research team at CWI of Amsterdam, a research institute in mathematics and computer science, along with ongoing support from Intel. VectorWise created the first-ever database engine that succeeds in unleashing the performance potential of modern computer hardware. 

The Ingres VectorWise project provides superior database technology that will allow industry developers to fully take advantage of advances in modern processor and storage hardware. These developments are a pre-cursor for the next generation of business software and database technologies. Data management technology based on the Ingres VectorWise project will allow businesses to manage their current data at highly reduced costs, or scale up their database workloads. Ingres VectorWise will enable businesses to perform data analysis tasks that were previously not feasible. Initial results show that the Ingres VectorWise project achieves more than 10x performance gains.

“This technology breakthrough will enable a CFO to easily analyze hundreds of millions of business transactions in seconds - even on a laptop at 35,000 feet,” said Roger Burkhardt, CEO, Ingres. “This ability to extract deep insights from detailed business data at the ‘speed of thought’ will empower all leaders to make better business decisions, from anywhere at any time.” 

Business and infrastructure software has failed to keep up with the continuous advancements in chip and memory technologies, and therefore applications run much more slowly than is possible. The Ingres VectorWise project allows business software to get the best out of modern chips and process business data at rates that were previously impossible. The combination of open source software and a less costly hardware server makes it possible at a far lower cost.

“Intel collaborates with enterprise software ecosystem leaders and innovators and enables business applications to perform best on Intel architecture,” said Kumar Balasubramanian, senior director, Software and Services Group, Intel Corporation. “The VectorWise project and resulting new software combined with the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series and new Intel® microarchitecture, codenamed Nehalem, delivers breakthrough performance in data analytics processing, and lowers TCO for the enterprise. We are pleased to be the first to show the potential of this project through the Ingres Database built on open source.”

More about the Ingres VectorWise Project
The goal of the Ingres VectorWise project was to improve the performance of database systems by orders of magnitude and to bridge the efficiency gap between databases and application-specialized solutions. This has been achieved by redesigning database architecture to exploit the latest hardware technologies from companies like Intel. The result– a ground-breaking database kernel – is now being combined with the leading open source relational database from Ingres.

“We are very excited that future Ingres products coming out of this collaboration will bring the VectorWise technology to market undiluted, without compromises. The business model of Ingres ensures continued open innovation,” said Peter Boncz, award winning CWI scientist and VectorWise co-founder. “Given that VectorWise is all about re-architecting database technology to match modern hardware, it has been a privilege to work with Intel.”

Ingres VectorWise Project Results
The Ingres VectorWise project team has worked with Intel to evaluate database performance on the new Intel Xeon processor 5500 series based platform. To date, the results of the project have demonstrated dramatic cost and performance capabilities as evidenced by nearly 80 fold speed up on a query modelled after the Q1 query of TPC-H (3) suite on the Intel Xeon processor.

For an overview of the technology behind this groundbreaking performance, go to www.ingres.com/vectorwise and download the whitepaper on IngresVectorWise.