Ingres, OpenIngres and OpenSource
I used to work for Ingres (in London) who were a fantastic company to work for. Amazingly, they are the only company I have ever worked for to use newsgroups for internal technical discussions and knowledge sharing instead of email aliases. I once read that processing an individual email costs a company 10 cents. In the early 90’s, Ingres was under commercial pressure from another large relational database vendor, Oracle. Instead of responding to this challenge, Ingres tended to ‘fiddle while Rome burned’, discuss the API naming convention by committee and stoutly defend the technical purity of page level locking (Oracle supported row level locking and capitalised heavily) from a lofty ivory tower....